


The Library Unpublished

by al_fa



Category: Original Work
Genre: Gen, Metafiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-30
Updated: 2017-09-10
Packaged: 2018-12-03 19:48:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 11
Words: 34,368
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11539230
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/al_fa/pseuds/al_fa
Summary: A bibliophile and a book thief stumble upon a book which they thought to be fictional, and get drawn into an impossible mystery.





	1. Chapter 0

**Author's Note:**

> Spoiler warning: Some of the characters in this work like to talk about pop culture. As such, there will be light spoilers for the settings, themes and general content of various works. Generally, no major plot points will be spoiled for works which actually exist. The one exception to this rule is [The Northern Caves](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3659997/chapters/8088522) by nostalgebraist, a clever postmodern examination of fandom (available on this very site). I'd recommend that you read it before continuing. 
> 
> Also note that the characters' opinions on the works they discuss don't necessarily represent the view of the author.
> 
> Updates will be posted every Sunday.


	2. Chapter 1

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editor's note: I did not write this, but merely transcribed it from a manuscript of dubious origin. The text appears unchanged, except for formatting and a division into chapters I felt was fitting. To protect the innocent, a name has been changed (mine). This note will hopefully make more sense after reading.

After 90 days, the onboard computer is still maintaining the passenger's metabolism at the level of a hibernating frog. He'd always been fascinated by the fact that certain frogs can spend the winter completely frozen, and that, when spring comes, they defrost and begin living again.

The onboard computer displayed: "End of hibernation".

He tried to open his eyes, but his eyelids only fluttered ineffectually. The chill of an artificial winter nested deep within his bones, resisting his attempts to drive it out. He was impatient. He had endured months of a dreamlike state of half-consciousness, with his thoughts chasing each other in futile circles. He had barely been aware enough to grasp his prison. Now, freedom was imminent.

With a deceivingly mechanical click, the organic scaffolding released him, and his burgeoning panic receded again. He took his first full breath of air in months. As his lungs expanded, he could feel his heartbeat quickening, and now, finally, he could open his eyes again.

The light did not dazzle him. In the final moments of his captivity, the hibernation systems had injected trace amounts of a drug into his veins, which, among other effects, had caused his pupils to contract. After hibernation periods exceeding a month, it was necessary to help some reflexes along as the body relearned them. Unused to the signals sent by his optic nerve, his brain did not yet see. Fragments of light rearranged kaleidoscopically over the course of a minute before he could recognize the scenery.

The hibernation corridor extend along the inner rim of an enormous wheel which spun to simulate gravity. The floor curving upward in two directions disoriented him. As his naturally evolved brain was used to the idea of a horizon, he unconsciously focused on the wall opposite the hibernation chambers, which consisted entirely of screens showing the outside.

Mars filled that panorama.

Free of hibernation's stranglehold, he moved like a newborn animal. His tentative steps—

My phone beeped once. That high-pitched, piercing whine was always enough to pull me out of whatever trance I was in, instantly shattering the walls of any fictional universe. Given my tendencies, that was a good thing. Before my great ringtone reform of '13, far too many phone calls had gone by entirely unnoticed. Of course, the annoyance being caused by a sensible measure didn’t mean I couldn't hate past Mike for inflicting it on me.

I swiped the screen. A message from _sein_, as I had suspected.

 **_sein_** : yo, what're you reading?

I smiled. Most people would have asked what I was doing, but _sein_ knew me too well. Hardly a second went by without me reading anything. Whenever circumstances permitted—and sometimes, even when they didn't—I had my nose in some book.

 **m1k** : The book you got me yesterday.

I put my e-reader to sleep to check the cover. No image, not even the name of the author, only the title in a large font.

 **m1k** : Ashes on Mars.

 **_sein_** : nice that you finally got to that one. how is it?

 **m1k** : Ehhh... middling, to be honest. It's prehistoric, as far as Science Fiction goes. Reads as though it's been written in the eighties. The author plays old-hat tropes like cryosleep straight.

 **_sein_** : lol

 **m1k** : Don't make fun of me. In Science Fiction, a book's value depends heavily on its ideas. If you can't offer a new spin on a concept everyone knows already, don't use it. Besides, you got me this book, you might as well listen to my opinion on it.

That was the deal which had evolved between the two of us, over the years. _sein_ wasn't much of a reader, but couldn't stand to be less than up-to-date on pop culture. They wanted to get every reference, no matter how irrelevant. I had offered my unsolicited opinion on a wide range of literature in some dusty forum, and they had reached out to me with more specific questions. Before long, they had started to procure books for my reading pleasure in exchange for a quick summary or two. I had bought my e-reader at their insistence, and never once regretted it.

 **_sein_** : not making fun of you. it might actually be from the eighties

 **m1k** : That's not what I've come to expect from you :)

 **_sein_** : i know. i always have the hottest warez, fresh from the ocr.

 **m1k** : Yes, you're in tune with the torrents. Get on with it, braggart.

 **_sein_** : thing is, this epub was basically anonymous, no metadata to speak of. complete amateur must have made it

 **m1k** : Really? I've read a third of it by now and haven't found a single OCR error. Did you send me some self-published crap by accident?

 **_sein_** : got it from a trustworthy source, though it was bundled with a lot of other stuff

 **m1k** : We don't know the publication date, then.

 **_sein_** : no. for all we know, it could have never been published at all

 **_sein_** : you watch the movie yet?

Oh, damn, I had completely forgotten that. Sometimes, _sein_ got the idea into their head that a book alone couldn't provide the full experience and sent a streaming link along with the ebook.

 **m1k** : I'm not really in the mood for an adaptation of this. Remember when you got me Solaris?

Solaris, considered in isolation, might have been a good movie, but Tarkovsky couldn't have missed Lem's point harder if that had been his intention. It probably had been. That was a recurring issue with hard Science Fiction.

 **_sein_** : it isn't like solaris. not an adaptation at all

 **_sein_** : well, not really

 **_sein_** : watch it! can't explain this without spoilers

 **m1k** : I'll finish the book first, then I'll see.

 **_sein_** : tell me at once, really stoked for this

That much enthusiasm was unusual for _sein_. They tended to be more ironic in their enjoyment. Moreover, dry, hard Science Fiction wasn't really their thing, as would be expected from someone who didn't crack open a novel from time to time; the genre didn't really seem to exist outside of books, with the exception of stand-outs like 2001. As a functional illiterate as far as movies were concerned, I wasn't really qualified to make that kind of statement, though.

I woke my e-reader and continued. There seemed to be about two hundred pages left; an outdated unit of measurement, but one I felt comfortable with. I was going to be finished in less than two hours.

* * *

**m1k** : I've watched it.

 **_sein_** : and?

 **m1k** : I don't know what I expected, but certainly not that.

 **_sein_** : lol

 **m1k** : You know I'm not a movie critic. I don't have the verbiage for properly dissecting this.

 **m1k** : But damn if it wasn't overambitious.

 **_sein_** : i know, right? one of those hidden gems. wasn't marketed at all, floated around in relative obscurity

 **_sein_** : some call it a cult movie, but you barely find discussion of it on the internet

 **_sein_** : seems like you either learn of it by word-of-mouth or not at all

 **_sein_** : you press play, and it seems like some french art movie at first

 **_sein_** : and then it pulls the rug out from under you like no ones business

 **m1k** : I didn't mean overambitious as a compliment...

 **_sein_** : hush, you. how many of the references did you spot?

 **m1k** : 2001, I guess. And it borrowed part of the plot from Ashes on Mars, obviously.

 **_sein_** : lol

 **m1k** : Did I miss a lot?

 **_sein_** : where should i even start. harold and maude, the matrix, monty python's flying circus...

 **_sein_** : tell me about the ashes on mars references, want to know more about that book

 **m1k** : There are some direct quotes in the movie, of course. Plotwise, like in the movie, the protagonist goes to Mars to scatter the ashes of a loved one. It's his mother though, not his wife.

 **_sein_** : hmm, interesting. can see young nemo changing that

 **_sein_** : then again, the part with elises ashes might not have anything to do with the book at all, depending on how you interpret the movie

 **m1k** : There's a lengthy drama prelude, then the plot basically starts after the space funeral. The protagonist tries to leave his past life behind and get to know new people on Mars, but it's futile. There's always one last phone call he has to take, one last tie to be cut. During that ordeal, he develops health issues. His fingers are perpetually cold, and his pulse gets dangerously low from time to time, causing him to black out. He manages to get himself free from his social obligations at last, at the cost of the symptoms getting worse.

 **m1k** : At the end, it's one of those "Or was it?"-things. Basically, the book, at some point, poses the question of whether he awoke from the hibernation at all. It's pointedly unresolved.

 **_sein_** : ah

 **m1k** : It was an entertaining book, though somewhat old-school. Did I date it correctly? When was it actually written?

 **_sein_** : nemo was born 1975 and fifteen when he wrote it. do the math ;)

 **m1k** : I mean the real Ashes on Mars, not the fictional one. The one the movie took its inspiration from.

 **_sein_** : no clue, honestly

 **_sein_** : well, either before 2001 or after 2010

I stared at the screen. This was the sort of riddle _sein_ liked to pose. I had never found out whether they presented their reasoning as leaps of logic intentionally, but whenever they did, I was determined to retrace them. I had never been able to resist the temptation of pretending to be more intelligent than I really was.

The first step was always Wikipedia. A quick search revealed only one match for 2001, the date when the director had started seeking financiers for his project. It made sense that the idea for the script would be basically finished by then, which meant that an inspiration as central as Ashes on Mars would most likely already have existed.

The second date was more confusing, though. How could Ashes on Mars have been written after the release of the movie?

 **m1k** : I can understand 2001, but what's up with 2010?

 **_sein_** : are you aware of a little thing called

 **_sein_** : fanfiction

That made a surprising amount of sense.

 **m1k** : Awfully artistic for a fanfiction. Writing a whole novel around two little fragments of text in some obscure movie? That seems a little obsessive to me.

 **_sein_** : lol, "obsessive"

 **_sein_** : have you met the internet?

 **m1k** : Well, in any case, I can appreciate it. It certainly is of a higher quality than most fanfiction I've seen.

Truth to be told, I hadn't seen much in that vein. Fanfiction tended to show a severe lack of thoughtful editing, and even in my younger, more "adventurous" years, that had chased me away quickly, no matter the plot.

 **_sein_** : truth

 **_sein_** : thats still strange, though

 **_sein_** : ive never been one for fanfic either, so i dont know all the really dank hideouts

 **_sein_** : but ive looked over the big archives. ao3, ff.net, you know

 **_sein_** : googled in the wild, of course

 **_sein_** : havent found anything like ashes

 **m1k** : It must have been deleted, then. An old shame?

 **_sein_** : unlikely. things that dont draw massive flame dont get deleted

 **_sein_** : and with massive flame, therell be scorch marks left behind

 **_sein_** : see that metaphor? goddamn

 **_sein_** : anyway, things you really cant find on the internet are rare

 **m1k** : You did find it on the internet, though.

 **_sein_** : sure, in a bundle in some obscure russian private torrent network. really had to flex my trawling muscles to find it, too

 **_sein_** : makes more sense if its some paperback from the early nineties with a print run of a hundred copies than a fanfiction i guess

 **_sein_** : who would put an obscure fanfiction into a generic ebook bundle?

 **m1k** : That question has got to be rhetorical. Have you met the internet?

 **_sein_** : good one. anyway, bye. ill take a closer look at that bundle i think

 **m1k** : Do that, and get back to me when you find out anything else. Bye :)

I might have reconsidered that request, had I known where it would eventually lead me.


	3. Chapter 2

I stared at my phone resentfully. There was a clear drawback to having the most annoying ringtone imaginable: Phones could ring at night. Every once in a while I forgot to put it on silent when I went to sleep. Usually, no one had any business with me at night.

Usually. Now that I was awake anyway, I might as well look at the message that had woken me. To my surprise, there were a lot more than one.

 **_sein_** : hey dude

 **_sein_** : sorry to message you that late

 **_sein_** : must be the middle of the night over where you are, right?

I can't remember ever having told _sein_ in which timezone I live, but it's just like them to figure that out from my messaging patterns. Considerate of them to think of that when messaging me, I guess, but still somewhat creepy.

 **_sein_** : found something else for you, wanted to make sure you got it immediately. im basically one foot over the doorstep, going on vacation

 **_sein_** : see you in two weeks

Receiving File: 2302554979.epub

Shit. Why couldn't _sein_ have sent that per email as usual? They knew that I was hopeless with technology. It would be a nightmare to get that file from my phone to my e-reader.

I looked at the file again. Usually, _sein_ wasn't sloppy with filenames, formatting every book's filename as: Author's Family Name, Author's Given Name - [Series] Title. They also tended to include a few words on what kind of book it was, why I should read it and what priority I should assign to it.

I lay back and pulled the sheets up to my chin. They had been in a hurry. Their torrent program probably assigned a random integer as the filename for whatever paranoid reason, and they just hadn't gotten around to changing it.

The explanation was reasonable, but I just couldn't stop thinking about that book. I knew neither the name nor the author, only that _sein_ had compromised their usual standards of quality to get it to me fast enough. It must have been something they knew would interest me, but we hadn't talked about any movies or series lately.

Which meant that it had something to do with Ashes on Mars.

I threw back the covers and fumbled for the light switch. My sleep schedule was going to be ravaged, but there was no way around this. Some day, my curiosity was going to be the death of me.

 

This book had an author as well as a title, at least according to the cover. Takatsuki Sen - The Black Goat's Egg. Again, there was no image, only black text on a white background.

I didn't know how to check the metadata for a publication date. I didn't have to; I already knew that this had to bear some relation to Ashes on Mars. I could see no other reason why _sein_ would have sent it, otherwise.

I clamped down on the impulse to google the author's name. I was going to read this unaware of any relation to any other work and judge it based on its own merits.

* * *

In darkness, sounds are louder. Separated by two floors and innumerable walls, I can hear the creaks of the opening front door. Heavy breathing accompanies the sound of something being dragged over the doorstep. A faint whimper of protest reaches my ears.

"Don't kill me, please."

Mother is home.

 

I lie awake. My shallow breath is a chisel chipping away at yet another sleepless night.

I remember the fear I once felt, on the eve of first discovering what kind of animal my mother was. I remember the taste of bile rising in the back of my throat as I considered what she had been doing in our home behind my back all those years. I remember sneaking around, finding her tools and being utterly terrified.

Those memories are fading away even now, as I am listening to the faint, muffled screams of yet another victim. There is no absolute fear. There is no measure of emotion the brain will not tire of, no blade that boredom will not dull in time. From that, does it not follow that there is no irredeemable monster?

A voice in my head screams incoherently about morality and ethics. I cannot help but wonder: If it were right, would it struggle against my other thoughts like this? Hysterically, it attempts to cover up its lack of conviction.

Tonight's self, which has rejected the notion of absolute fear, can no longer entertain thoughts of absolute morality.

Tonight's self thinks of mother fondly.

Tomorrow is unknowable.

* * *

It was morning. I had read through the entire book in one sitting. I didn't know whether the insane characters or the lurid descriptions of carnage had gripped me more. What set shivers down my spine, though, was the unshakeable sense of the familiar. Black Goat's Egg. I had heard that title before, somewhere.

I swiped my phone to wake it and sent a message to _sein_.

 **m1k** : What movie was that from?

 **m1k** : Damn, you're not there. I forgot.

 **m1k** : Nonetheless, I'll send my review right now. I think it will be easier while it's still fresh in my mind.

 **m1k** : The plot is that the protagonist is the son of a serial killer. He finds out early on what's going on and gets caught up in a moral quandary. It's obvious that society would want him to report his mother, but he can't help but empathize with her. This, of course, makes him doubt himself; is he fated to be a monster as well?

 **m1k** : Black Goat's Egg takes moral philosophy to a pretty dark place. It's a reflection on modern society's values. The protagonist connects to society's enemy far more easily than to society itself, and in turn normal society becomes the enemy, an alien hive mind straight out of Kafka.

 **m1k** : To be honest, it seems as though the author might have read too much Nietzsche, or Freud, maybe. Both of those thought that social hierarchies suppress free expression of the self.

 **m1k** : From time to time, the book draws parallels between absolute evil and absolute (moral) authority. The main character cannot reject his mother's authority without questioning society's authority as well, because both are a result of his upbringing. At the same time, he's too emotionally stunted to become his own person, either. It's like he's trying and failing to be the subject of a Bildungsroman. The coming-of-age story of a bird too weak to peck its way out of its shell.

 **m1k** : I'm rambling. Let's get to the point.

 **m1k** : This is fictional like Ashes on Mars, right? I want to note that I haven't googled yet where it's from, but I can't shake the feeling that it's familiar.

 **m1k** : I wanted to get a fresh impression, you know? I might recant some of those points after I know more about the fictional environment the book was created in.

I put the phone to sleep again. I had grown so used to _sein_'s commentary that writing a review without it felt like something was missing. A comedic counterpoint, maybe.

I smiled. I tended to complain about some aspects of _sein_'s overconfident online persona, especially the way they never ceased poking fun at me. Still, there was something about them I had grown fond of.

I started up my computer. Browsing on phones was something I had never quite gotten the hang of. Both the interface and the screen were too small, and somehow, my phone had never quite seemed as responsive as my computer. Maybe it was the way the keyboard's keys clicked under my fingers. I was just too analog for touchscreens.

Within seconds, I had found what I was looking for.

 **m1k** : I've looked it up now. Tokyo Ghoul, eh? I vaguely remember reading the first few chapters of that during my manga phase a few years ago. Sadly, it deteriorated into endless action scenes.

 **m1k** : It really fits. I'm re-reading those first few chapters right now, and Black Goat's Egg really adds to the characterization of Kaneki. The way he can't come to terms with his new monstrousness is reflected in the Black Goat's son's indecisiveness on judging monstrous actions.

 **m1k** : It's different from Ashes on Mars in style, themes, characters... basically everything. Still, as a second defictionalization popping out of nowhere it corroborates the theory of both being fanfiction. If I hadn't known about that connection, though, I never would have guessed that both could have been written by the same author. It's one thing to assume a style for a few paragraphs of text, but sustaining that masquerade over an entire novel? I can't begin to imagine how many hours must have gone into editing this until every idiosyncrasy indicative of the author's original style had been ironed out.

I left it at that. There were a lot of open questions left, but unlike _sein_, I had no way to find further books.

I paused. Now that I thought about it, _sein_ wasn't really qualified to find obscure fictional books either. There were immense amounts of ebooks floating around on the net, and there had to be a large amount of fictional books. It would be like trying to find several hundred needles in a haystack the size of the sun—if you didn't know exactly what you were looking for.

That was where I would come in.

I started googling. As usual, the search quickly ended at TV Tropes. No other repository on the contents of fiction was as easily accessible. Usually, the highest barrier was figuring out their inane naming scheme.

"Fictional document" contained what I was looking for. Restraining myself to proper novels, I took some very unstructured notes.

 

Daniel Handler wrote some (whoever that is)

Ballads in Dragon Bones

Several in Lord of the Rings

Does Stephen King's metafictional clusterfuck count?

Jorge Luis Borges (several)

The Princess Bride

The Rider on the White Horse?

Craig Thomas (maybe)

Mr Bunnsy has an Adventure (& various other Pratchett examples)

anything by Kilgore Trout

Several Harry Potter examples

The King in Yellow

The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer (how would that one even work, though?)

The Hive Queen and the Hegemon

Inkheart

P.G. Wodehouse examples

The Dragonsong Trilogy

Walter Moers examples

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy

 

Those were only examples of books occuring in books, not other media, but I had to start somewhere.

Next, I looked at the other relevant TV Tropes page: defictionalizations. No matter what our obsessive fanfiction writer thought they were doing, they weren't breaking entirely new ground. A quick scan of the list showed, however, that most defictionalizations were officially licensed. Money obviously wasn't the fanfiction writer's objective. Even fame couldn't be it, given the absurdly reclusive method of publishing.

I had barely spent ten minutes on my research at this point, but I felt disheartened already. Searching for all of those titles wasn't going to be easy, and I knew that I had barely scratched the surface. None of the two books that had appeared so far were on my list. It was time to attack this from another angle.

Fortunately, I knew just the expert to ask.

 

 **m1k** : Hey Cio. I need some advice.

 **cio_ci** : hey, mike :) you missed engineering mechanics 101 yesterday, i heard. everything fine?

 **m1k** : Yeah, it's not really worth my time. How do you even know that, though?

 **cio_ci** : what anyone knows, everyone knows :)

 **cio_ci** : social being, y'know, unlike some i might point out

 **cio_ci** : so what did you want to ask me about?

 **m1k** : Fanfiction.

 **cio_ci** : you finally decided to dip your toes into the deep end of the pool :D looking for recommendations to read or writing advice?

 **m1k** : No, it's... stranger than that. Have I told you about _sein_?

 **cio_ci** : your internet friend? the one who enables your unhealthy book addiction at the expense of hardworking writers? :)

 **m1k** : Yeah, that one.

 **cio_ci** : you don't talk about him often, that's for sure.

 **m1k** : There's not really much to talk about. For instance, I don't know whether they're a 'he'.

 **cio_ci** : 'they' as a singular pronoun? for shame. i expected more from someone with your diligence regarding capitalization and punctuation.

 **m1k** : Popular consensus is on my side here. Also, _sein_ might actually be multiple people. I have no way to know.

 **cio_ci** : so they're

 **cio_ci** : bah, that's an abomination. fortunately, pronouns are grammatically optional.

 **cio_ci** : so _sein_'s obsessed with privacy.

 **m1k** : Maybe, but if they are, so am I. We mostly talk about books, not ourselves.

 **cio_ci** : nor each other. got it. what's _sein_ got to do with fanfiction?

 **m1k** : This is going to sound crazy.

 **cio_ci** : intriguing

 **m1k** : _sein_'s been getting me some weird books lately.

 **cio_ci** : like, chuck tingle weird or voynich manuscript weird?

 **m1k** : You've read House of Leaves, right?

 **cio_ci** : i was the one who first recommended it to you, dummy

 **m1k** : Really? That must have been an eternity ago, I remember reading it in middle school. Anyway, and this is hypothetical, how would you feel if someone handed you Zampano's unedited manuscript?

 **cio_ci** : huh. interesting idea for a fanfiction.

 **m1k** : Yeah, that's what I thought as well. It doesn't end there, though. Imagine Balin's diary turning up after that, or the unabridged Princess Bride.

 **cio_ci** : same writer?

 **m1k** : I have no idea who the writer is. _sein_ found the first on some obscure private torrent network and didn't have time to tell me about the second one.

 **cio_ci** : wait, this is real? you can get me a fanfiction written as balin's diary??

 **m1k** : Hypothetical example. The real books were Ashes on Mars (from some obscure European movie) and Takatsuki Sen's The Black Goat's Egg, from Tokyo Ghoul.

 **cio_ci** : found the anime one

 **m1k** : What? Where did you find it?

 **cio_ci** : ao3. where would you look for fanfic?

 **cio_ci** : oh, there's a disclaimer here. they're just reposting it, not the original author.

 **cio_ci** : huh. might have gotten it from the same torrent.

 **m1k** : For a moment, I hoped I had a new lead. Damn.

 **cio_ci** : playing detective? :)

 **m1k** : Yeah, I guess I stumbled into it. It's a mystery, you know? Someone spent a lot of time on writing those, then released them in the most obscure and ineffective way possible.

 **cio_ci** : this black goat thing is getting a lot of traction, though. reviews, kudos—the works

 **m1k** : Not that weird. It's pretty good actually. Not only is it an accurate reproduction of what is described in Tokyo Ghoul, it's pretty good on its own.

 **cio_ci** : you praising fanfic? wtf

 **m1k** : We talked about this. It's not that I dislike all fanfictions, I just dislike the badly-written ones.

 **m1k** : Which are basically all of them.

 **cio_ci** : pfffff

 **m1k** : Your work excluded, of course.

 **cio_ci** : too late to butter me up, snob

 **cio_ci** : what were you trying to ask me about, though?

 **m1k** : Well, you've made this metafiction thing kind of your shtick, right? I'm not actually sure we're dealing with fanfiction here. I'd like to hear your thoughts and ideas on this scenario. Fictional books are suddenly real. How can that be, what does it mean?

 **cio_ci** : okay hmm

 **cio_ci** : first off, fictional books are more impressive than real ones. stephen king alludes to the dark tower in purposely vague terms, right? the readers build this tower in their head that's not only greater than any building ever built, but even greater than any building ever imagined, because they don't have to deal with the details, only with a monolithic and absolute concept. same deal with books. doesn't surprise me that fans are inspired by those monuments in their heads. what does surprise me is that you found the results to be decent, given the expectations they have to satisfy.

 **cio_ci** : you've read the northern caves, right?

 **m1k** : sure. senile author writes incomprehensible book, fans go literally mad trying to figure it out.

 **cio_ci** : that's only one interpretation, but sure, let's let it stand. fact of the matter is, TNC is an exception to my previous point, because the fictional book isn't epic or anything, it's just weird.

 **cio_ci** : maybe weird to an epic degree.

 **cio_ci** : what i'm trying to say is that no one would write it. if you ever find something like tnc, that's the time to reconsider your fanfiction explanation. until then, i think it's the most obviously valid hypothesis, regardless of how the works were published. some authors are just that weird.

 **m1k** : Okay, that's your assessment of the situation, then? No other ideas?

 **cio_ci** : nah, i was just buying time while i brainstormed.

 **cio_ci** : 1: the books have been real all along, just obscure.

 **m1k** : We thought of that one, but _sein_ didn't find anything on the internet.

 **cio_ci** : did you look at worldcat to find out whether they're in libraries anywhere?

 **cio_ci** : ask in a bookstore maybe?

 **m1k** : I didn't. I can imagine that _sein_ did, though.

 **cio_ci** : alright, next one

 **cio_ci** : 2: the books were written by the actual authors, but never published. they kept them as background notes for their other work, and they somehow got leaked.

 **m1k** : They're pretty well-edited for that.

 **m1k** : I could imagine a fan editing them, though.

 **cio_ci** : this is possible for one book, but less likely for two showing up in close succession imho

 **cio_ci** : also, wouldn't the original black goat's egg be in japanese?

 **m1k** : Oops. Damn anglocentrism.

 **m1k** : Wait, I have a hypothesis, too. What if someone programmed a computer to extrapolate novels from snatches of text and descriptions?

 **cio_ci** : :D

 **m1k** : You're laughing, but computers can color pictures based on small color clues. Not just in blocky cartoon colors, I mean.

 **cio_ci** : you're thinking of a neural network. sure, those are good at pattern-matching. maybe google could, with a few years of work, get one to plausibly imitate an author's writing style.

 **cio_ci** : but i can't imagine a neural network managing large-scale consistency issues like plot holes or plausible character growth. did whatever you read seem like a barely connected quilt of story patches?

 **m1k** : No, it didn't.

 **m1k** : There's no way, then?

 **cio_ci** : well, it's not impossible. neural networks can theoretically do anything. however, a plot is a pattern with an insane amount of details you can get wrong in lots and lots of non-obvious ways. i don't think it's feasible.

 **cio_ci** : might be a nice idea for a story, though.

 **cio_ci** : thanks for the inspiration :)

 **m1k** : No problem. Thank you for your ideas as well.

 **cio_ci** : you're welcome. keep me in the loop on this :)

 

Cio had been helpful, but the trail itself was cold. Until _sein_ came back and offered more books, there was nothing I could do to disprove any of the hypotheses we had formed.

I sighed. I might as well use the time to catch up on my schoolwork.


	4. Chapter 3

**_sein_** : im back!

 **m1k** : Welcome back. Did you get yourself a nice sunburn?

 **_sein_** : :P

 **_sein_** : it wasnt that kind of vacation

 **_sein_** : anyway, theres news

 **_sein_** : re: ashes

 **m1k** : Thank God. I'm on the edge of my seat here.

 **m1k** : Did you read my thoughts on Black Goat's Egg?

 **_sein_** : not yet, but ive watched tokyo ghoul. i assume i wont be surprised

 **m1k** : Sure, I guess. So what's the news?

 **_sein_** : just before i went, ive been digging around in the community i got ashes from

 **_sein_** : and you can guess how successful ive been

 **m1k** : Not very?

 **_sein_** : those guys value their privacy highly. no chance theyll give some noob poking them with a stick any info that could lead to them being pinned down

 **_sein_** : mind, most of them are careful to keep to grey areas

 **_sein_** : but you know the slander and lies against pirates

 **_sein_** : couldnt even find out where the bundle had come from, much less one specific book inside

 **m1k** : You did say you had news, though. Also, you found The Black Goat's Egg somewhere, and I assume the ao3 post isn't the original.

 **_sein_** : true that

 **_sein_** : so the egg turned up in a similar manner

 **_sein_** : shady obscure torrent and whatnot

 **_sein_** : hidden between all kinds of other books, most of them freshly scanned or ripped

 **_sein_** : what little evidence i have

 **_sein_** : indicates that it turned up just a little later than ashes

 **_sein_** : if that is correct, ive basically been sitting at the source

 **_sein_** : you should be grateful :P

 **_sein_** : anyway, as youve noticed, the egg has made big splashes in the last two weeks

 **_sein_** : tokyo ghoul is pretty well known, and the internet pounced on it

 **_sein_** : rave reviews, freshly made tvtropes page with a thousand wicks, etc

 **_sein_** : havent seen anything similar happen with ashes, though

 **_sein_** : that one seems to be our secret still

 **m1k** : But now, the internet is asking the same questions we've been asking ourselves. Where did it come from? Who's the author? Is it even a fanfiction, or was Tokyo Ghoul just inspired by something extremely obscure?

 **_sein_** : yeah

 **m1k** : And, did anyone find anything yet? Two weeks is an eternity in internet terms.

 **_sein_** : too much. its like that scene in life of brian

 **_sein_** : everyone and their mothers are claiming to be the true author right now

 **m1k** : And that will mask the true trail.

 **_sein_** : indeed

 **_sein_** : no way to find out who wrote it now

 **_sein_** : we still got the upper hand

 **m1k** : Because no one cares about Ashes on Mars?

 **_sein_** : because ive been watching the torrents

 **_sein_** : and just five minutes ago another suspicious package came in

 **_sein_** : and im starting to see a trend re: number and type of books in the bundle

 **_sein_** : so i look at the bundle, and what do i see?

 **_sein_** : a little gem called

 **_sein_** : the grasshopper lies heavy

 **m1k** : What.

 **_sein_** : and given that ive binged the man in the high castle recently and dug around afterward, read up on the difference to the original novel etc

 **_sein_** : it was easy enough to know what that was about

 **_sein_** : and i dont think anyone else knows about this yet

 **_sein_** : so youll be the first one to read it

 **_sein_** : check your mail :)

A cursory glance revealed that what _sein_ had found was indeed close to The Grasshopper Lies Heavy.

 **m1k** : Ok, this was to be expected, I guess.

 **_sein_** : you dont sound very excited

 **m1k** : It's more of the same, isn't it? I'm waiting for an upheaval.

 **_sein_** : patience, padawan

 **m1k** : I'll read it, of course, and try to find some clues in it.

 **_sein_** : thanks. in exchange, ill tell you when i find something new

 **_sein_** : or actually get through to one of the pirates

* * *

The Grasshopper Lies Heavy yielded no new insights, except that the unknown author could imitate Philip K. Dick's style as well. There might have been something of value in a comparative re-reading of the books we had gotten so far, but that seemed like a lot of effort. Whether I accepted it or not, this problem was starting to defeat me.

 **m1k** : Nothing new here.

 **_sein_** : neither here, at least so far

 **_sein_** : lets recap

 **_sein_** : weve got three books

 **m1k** : That we know off.

 **_sein_** : right

 **_sein_** : and they were all different, but clearly have the same motivation

 **_sein_** : and we can be sure even the most recent one wasnt made by a copycat

 **m1k** : Because a timeframe of two weeks isn't enough to write a novel, usually.

 **_sein_** : right

 **_sein_** : and we also think they were made by the same guy, or a team in close contact

 **_sein_** : because we got all of them from the same source

 **_sein_** : lets call this working hypothesis a: insanely prolific fanfiction writer

 **_sein_** : better hope they dont start on the necronomicon

 **m1k** : The Necronomicon? The presence of that book barely changed anything in Lovecaft's universe, given that Nyarlathotep and co. were basically doing what they wanted regardless.

 **m1k** : Have you read Crooked Little Vein by Warren Ellis?

 **_sein_** : hes the guy behind transmetropolitan, right? whats crooked little vein about

 **m1k** : An extremely vanilla guy gets comissioned by the White House Chief of Staff to search for a lost book. To his incredible discomfort, the trail leads through a number of weird fetish subcultures. And when I say weird, I mean that there's a scene where a naked old man strangles a cow to death to drink milk directly from its still-warm body.

 **_sein_** : that sounds udderly disgusting

 **m1k** : ...

 **_sein_** : oh come on that one owned, did you see my lightning-quick reaction time?

 **m1k** : Anyway, the book the guy is looking for is supposedly a tool to brainwash people into good ole' 50's morality, thereby erasing all those weird fetishes. While that might not seem as terrifying as the summoning of Eldritch Abominations, it's not something I would want to see in any authority's hands.

 **_sein_** : lol, thats a completely new side of you

 **m1k** : What, me fighting for the right of people to do whatever they want in their own homes as long as they don't harm anyone?

 **_sein_** : dont take me so seriously, littlest libertarian :)

 **m1k** : The whole discussion is moot anyway. Even if there were some fanatic mashing away at his keyboard in a mad quest for defictionalization, he woudln't bring any magic tomes into existence. There's a clear line between fiction and Fiction, you know.

 **_sein_** : thats the m1k i know

 **m1k** : What, a voice of reason?

 **_sein_** : someone who strictly categorizes

 **m1k** : Well, they do say there's two types of people in the world :)

 **_sein_** : which kinds?

 **m1k** : Right now? The ones who expect a punchline and the ones who don't get disappointed.

 **_sein_** : ...

 **_sein_** : gn

 **m1k** : Good night :)

I fought to enforce some order on the buzzing thoughts in my head.

Our reasoning seemed to be sound, given our assumption that we were dealing with fanfiction, which seemed increasingly likely. More than anything, though, we needed more data points.

Luckily, there was a chance more books were already in our grasp. Anyone who released three books in two weeks must have had a stockpile somewhere, and anyone who has a stockpile likely releases more books whenever possible, especially after The Black Goat's Egg had gotten that much positive attention.

 **m1k** : On second thought, don't go to sleep quite yet.

 **m1k** : Can you get me some sort of list of the books you have access to?

 **m1k** : You might have missed something.

 **_sein_** : sure

 **_sein_** : tomorrow, though. night

 **m1k** : Tomorrow, then :)

* * *

**_sein_** : yo

 **_sein_** : ive been thinking

 **m1k** : How unusual :)

 **_sein_** : given your cavemanlike grasp of technology

 **_sein_** : letting you look through the torrents isnt really feasible

 **_sein_** : do you have a list of possible titles you could give me?

 **m1k** : Sure, wait a few minutes. I already researched this once, I can just pull up the list from that time.

 **_sein_** : great

 **_sein_** : the cleaner your formatting, the easier it will be to parse

 **m1k** : You're going to the trouble of programming for this?

 **_sein_** : lol

 **_sein_** : hacking a script together in python will take literally five minutes

 **_sein_** : youd have tried to look through all of that by hand?

 **m1k** : Let's just say that you've once again proven yourself to be more suited to a technological task :)

I sent the list over and got an answer ten minutes later.

 **_sein_** : nada. zilch

 **m1k** : Nowhere?

 **_sein_** : i havent looked through everything obvsly

 **_sein_** : but at least theres nothing else hiding in the packages weve already found something in

 **_sein_** : let me check in the bundle that came in today, though

 **_sein_** : nothing

 **_sein_** : ok, so lets look for ebooks without cover images

 **_sein_** : in this pile of otherwise pristine freshly ripped books

 **_sein_** : oh, jackpot

 **m1k** : Oh man, what is it?

 **m1k** : I'm feeling like a kid on Christmas Day, here.

 **_sein_** : this one is a doozy

 **_sein_** : have you heard of the chesscourt series?

 **m1k** : Oh no.

 **m1k** : Don't tell me you found The Northern Caves.

 **_sein_** : i did. its a pdf instead of an epub, weird

 **_sein_** : all the other chesscourt books are here, too, but they're epubs?

I set the phone to sleep and thought for a second. If I believed Cio's logic, we weren't dealing with an ordinary fanfiction writer. This would have been disquieting enough, but something else made it even more creepy. The Northern Caves wasn't very well-known, and the fact that this specific obscure book turned up after I had talked with Cio about it was strange enough. This was made even more suspicious by the fact that after the last book, I had wished for an upheaval.

I had gotten it. An upheaval made to order, which raised another hypothesis: someone was playing an extremely elaborate prank on me, and whoever they were, they had access to both my discussions with Cio and those with _sein_.

I braced myself and woke my phone again. Just in case, I had to probe carefully, without raising suspicion that I knew something was up.

 **m1k** : Do you have any idea what you've found there?

 **_sein_** : sure, dude, i know what google is

 **_sein_** : its a fictional fantasy series, right?

 **_sein_** : mentioned in a book called northern caves as well

 **_sein_** : which someone posted on ao3? didnt know they hosted original work as well

 **m1k** : Apparently. Mostly if it's fandom-related.

 **m1k** : I actually read The Northern Caves, way back when it was first posted.

 **m1k** : To add to your description: the Chesscourt series isn't that well-regarded, outside of a cult following.

 **m1k** : And even those obsessives dislike The Northern Caves.

 **m1k** : Well, it's a bit more complicated than that.

 **_sein_** : wait, this file is absurdly big. did they just put images of scanned pages in there?

 **m1k** : Probably. That would be fitting, actually.

 **m1k** : Also, it has over 3000 pages.

 **_sein_** : what

 **_sein_** : were talking about a single volume here, right

 **_sein_** : how was that ever published??

 **m1k** : It wasn't. There were a lot of weird circumstances around it.

 **m1k** : The author had had a falling-out with his publisher, which led to him self-publishing the book before The Northern Caves.

 **m1k** : Then he got some weird philosophical ideas in his head.

 **m1k** : Or did he have them before? I can't remember.

 **m1k** : Anyway, he thought that the best way to express his philosophy was to write a book so utterly confusing that any attempts at understanding it would lead to his philosophy in the end.

 **m1k** : Among other things the book is supposed to contain three pages of the letter 'a'.

 **_sein_** : sounds like a masterful troll

 **m1k** : He was sincere, though. Several characters actually did understand his philosophy in the end.

 **m1k** : One gained superpowers through it.

 **_sein_** : lol

 **m1k** : Not cool ones, though. He just talked three previously stable people into suicide.

 **_sein_** : dude, look out, then

 **_sein_** : dont want to have someones death on your conscience :P

 **m1k** : I'm not planning to read it.

 **m1k** : And I'm certainly not planning to read it out loud over the span of a weekend while on drugs.

 **_sein_** : sounds like a fun time though

 **_sein_** : lol

 **m1k** : I'd like to look over it, though. I want to check for a few simple things. There's some... "landmarks", I guess you could call them. Page numbers at which I should know exactly what's there.

 **_sein_** : sure man, knock yourself out

* * *

A cursory look was enough to determine that The Northern Caves was exactly as screwed up as promised. Regardless of it being a readable book, it was exactly what it should be: every direct citation fit, and every mentioned sub-story was where it should be.

It got me thinking. We had basically accepted the hypothesis of a prolific fanfiction writer, but The Northern Caves was going a few steps too far to be adequately supported by that. Not only must it have been supremely unfun to imitate Leonard Salby's deteriorating style, having to match all the known trivia about the book was a far too severe constraint. Between all the citations and the precisely known structure, it must have felt like putting in the last few pieces of a mosaic. Though many fanfiction writers liked the constraints working in a known universe imposed on them, this was something else entirely.

There was something else that didn't fit. I checked the first page of The Northern Caves on ao3 for the official page numbers of the Chesscourt novels. Altogether, they should have been 7485 pages long. The last chapter of The Northern Caves had been posted online on 10/23/2015.

 **m1k** : Fuck.

 **_sein_** : what ruffles your feathers on this beautiful evening?

 **m1k** : I did the math.

 **m1k** : The fanfiction writer theory can't be right.

 **m1k** : Even if they had started their work when the first, not the last, chapter of The Northern Caves was posted, they would only have had a bit more than two years to write 7485 pages, about half of which would have been for the (actually coherent) previous Chesscourt works.

 **_sein_** : and that would have been hard?

 **m1k** : It would have been utterly fucking impossible. Let's say you wrote a novel of 50k words every month. Perpetual NaNoWriMo, basically.

 **m1k** : You would equal 50k/250 = 200 pages per month.

 **m1k** : That's 4200 pages in two years, and if those are supposed to be of publishable quality, we're talking about writing faster than goddamn Brandon Sanderson here.

 **_sein_** : hmm

 **_sein_** : two people, maybe?

 **_sein_** : or five, now that i think of it

 **m1k** : That's not how it works. You do programming, right? You must know about Brooks' Law.

 **_sein_** : i program from time to time, doesnt mean im a software developer

 **_sein_** : means even less that im managing software developers, bah

 **_sein_** : but wikipedia got my back. alright, so youre saying that letting more people work on writing a book doesnt net you a faster book usually

 **m1k** : I don't think I've ever heard of a case when it did, actually. Though finding actual statistics on this would likely be rather hard.

 **_sein_** : someone whos really good at organizing stuff like this might be able to split a book into workable chunks

 **_sein_** : especially given the style requirements, you could hardly tell who wrote what

 **m1k** : Possible, yeah, but extremely unlikely.

 **m1k** : Let's face it: Our most likely hypothesis is bleeding out on the floor right now.

 **_sein_** : what would hypotheses even bleed, though?

 **m1k** : Probability percentage points, maybe?

 **m1k** : Do we have another hypothesis at all?

 **_sein_** : back in the day we considered that ashes might have inspired mr nobody

 **m1k** : It's really hard to see that happening with four different works, though.

 **_sein_** : indeed, not to mention that the theory was already shaky back then

 **m1k** : Where else could fictional books come from, though?

 **m1k** : I'm getting scared, man.

 **_sein_** : turn your light on

 **m1k** : Ha ha.

 **_sein_** : im serious

 **m1k** : Wow, that actually helps.

 **m1k** : But wait, how did you know that it's dark where I'm at?

 **m1k** : And how did you know to greet me with a "beautiful evening"?

 **_sein_** : well youre american arent you

 **m1k** : Yeah, but how did you know that? I don't make a habit of giving out that kind of information on the internet.

 **_sein_** : everyones american on the internet

 **_sein_** : also, i know at which times of day you post

 **_sein_** : and i notice when your tired fingers slip off the keyboard at night

 **_sein_** : leaving long streaks of agslsakfetohräs

 **_sein_** : was an informed guess

 **_sein_** : dont be paranoid, mikey

 **_sein_** : it aint a good look on you

 **m1k** : Sure. Sorry to doubt you, man.

Even the light couldn't banish the shiver that was running down my back. I was sure I hadn't ever told _sein_ my name. Lucky guess? Very possible, but still... I would have to be careful around them in the future, and I felt that I had to tell Cio about this.

At least I was pretty sure they weren't literally stalking me in real life. Hitting an Umlaut while mashing on a keyboard certainly didn't happen in America.

* * *

"You made it."

"You doubted me?" Cio laughed as she pulled out her seat. She wore her black hair straight today, along with an unassuming sweater and her customary glasses. "So, what's going on? It's unlike you to ask to meet up in our free time. At the Cave, even."

I smiled. "Why don't we get something to drink first? No, don't get up, I'll get both of our stuff."

There was a reason I had chosen the Cave to meet her. The café was designed for introverts like us: bookshelves split the café into small compartments with one table each, which, combined with the way the books drank sound, practically guaranteed privacy. As a side effect, it was impossible to get the waitstaff to notice you, which meant that orders had to be picked up at the bar.

I returned with a straight black coffee for her and a hot cocoa for myself.

She added a few drops of a maddeningly hot sauce she seemed to always have on her person, then eyed my cup mischievously. "Do you want some as well?"

"God, no."

"Still the tastes of a child, I see."

"I guess." I took a sip to steady my nerves. "There's a reason I asked you to meet me. A new book turned up. Two, actually."

"Which?" She was curious.

"The Grasshopper Lies Heavy."

"That's not very recent. Interesting."

"Amazon is streaming a series based on The Man in the High Castle right now, though if I understood it correctly, the book doesn't turn up there."

"They're all at least related to recent works, then. You said there had been two books."

"Yes. The second one was The Northern Caves."

She narrowed her eyes. "You're pulling my leg."

"I'm not."

"Actual factual TNC? Three thousand five hundred pages of gibberish? Did you check whether it matches the description in the story?"

"It does, as far as I could tell. The rest of the Chesscourt Series is there, as well."

Cio laughed. "Now I know you're joking. No one writes that quickly."

"You're the writer. Is it really not possible?"

She seemed to consider this. "Well, if there's a hard limit on writing speed, it's probably a lot higher."

I had already looked that up. "According to the internet, typing a hundred words per minute is possible, though you have to be really good."

She sighed. "Typing speed is not really relevant to the discussion, though. No one writes a book at the maximum typing speed, at least not a good one. You've read the non-Chesscourt books, right? Were they any good?"

"Yes. They were far from perfect, but very close to what was described in their works of origin."

Cio thought while sipping her coffee. This is why I could rely on her for something like this; she wasn't prone to saying or doing anything without putting a lot of thought into it.

Finally, she spoke. "Okay. I can see why you're spooked by this. I don't know which of our hypotheses even applies now."

I counted the hypotheses on my fingers. "Well, these books being the authors' background notes is just unrealistic. The same is true for the hypothesis of these books just being so obscure as to be virtually unknown. After publishing the first book of a series to no acclaim, no one would publish the second one."

"Right. What's left is the neural network. I can barely accept a computer increasing the speed of writing, given that selecting from ideas might be simpler than coming up with them. Still, this is technologically unlikely."

"Even accepting this, there's no motive. Someone could have done The Black Goat's Egg out of fannish enthusiasm, or even as a publicity stunt, but I can't see any motive for writing TNC at all. Of course you're achieving something thought to be impossible, as far as writing speed goes, but who would even care about such an obscure work?"

Cio was silent for a long while. I had emptied my cup before she spoke again. "I'm not sure. Doing something impossible might be a motive in itself. One thing is certain, now."

"What is?"

"The author of those books has a nigh superhuman ability to write quickly. I'd love to talk to whoever it turns out to be."

I nodded. "They're pretty fascinating, yeah."

Cio made a face. "'They' again?"

"We might be dealing with a collective here."

"It's not impossible. One guy writes The Black Goat's Egg, another The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. But splitting something like the Chesscourt Series between different people doesn't seem easy. Managing character and plot consistency is one thing, but in addition to that, various quotes have to be at the right page numbers."

"Too many boundary conditions. Right."

She smiled. "Boundary conditions? Have you've started paying attention in your engineering classes?"

"Without new books, what else could I have done with my time? Sein was on vacation."

"That's probably nowhere near the right pronunciation, you know."

"Sein?", I asked, mangling the pronunciation again in the process. "I had no idea that was more than a random string of letters."

"It's German, I think. Don't take my word on that, though. Look it up."

German? That fit with the Umlaut _sein_ had typed while button mashing. "Actually, I wanted to talk about Sein as well."

With a grin, Cio asked: "Trouble in pirate paradise?"

My face seemed to tell the whole story, given that she immediately apologized. "I'm sorry. Is it bad?"

"I don't know how to say this, but it's been weird the last few days. There's something wrong with The Northern Caves appearing so soon after we talked about it. I have this feeling someone's trying to pull a fast one on me and there's really only one culprit."

"You're accusing your internet friend of reading our chat log? That's pretty heavy."

"They're really tech savvy. I don't doubt that they could pull it off. Also..." I hesitated. Would Cio call me paranoid as well?

"Spit it out."

"They made some statements that revealed that they know more about me than I thought."

"Like what?"

"They told me to turn on the light while chatting last night, as if they not only knew that it was dark where I live, but that my light wasn't on right now."

"Hmm. Did you ask Sein about it? Maybe there's an innocent explanation."

"I did. They said that they guessed that I'm American from our usual chatting times, but I looked it up. On the west coast, it wasn't dark at the time. About the light in my room being dark, they didn't say anything, and I didn't want to ask more questions and seem even more paranoid."

Again, Cio thought for a while. "That doesn't seem like nothing, but it also isn't much. Maybe you had mentioned that you usually didn't turn on the light in your room or something. It's possible that Sein might retain that information while forgetting where exactly it came from."

"Probably. It scares me, though."

"That's reasonable. Be careful what you tell Sein about that, though. Friendships have been destroyed by lesser accusations."

"Right. Thank you, Cio."

"No problem. I've got to go now, sorry. Deadlines are due. Don't be a stranger!"

I nodded. I'd never thought about that turn of speech before. Did I want to be a stranger, as far as _sein_ was concerned?


	5. Chapter 4

**_sein_** : hey m1k

 **m1k** : Hey. More books?

 **_sein_** : well

 **_sein_** : i got through to the torrent lord

 **m1k** : ?

 **_sein_** : the guy who uploaded the mysterious ebook bundles

 **_sein_** : actually calls himself "TorrentLord" in various irc channels

 **m1k** : Oh wow, what a douche.

 **m1k** : How did you do it? I thought they were showing you the cold shoulder.

 **_sein_** : yeah, i had to do some pretty heavy sleuthing to even find the channel

 **_sein_** : then i listened in for a while, until i got some sense of who was who

 **_sein_** : and when the time was ripe, i pulled a classic con

 **_sein_** : imitated a friend of someone to get information

 **m1k** : What? How do you even begin to do something like that?

 **_sein_** : usernames are arbitrary

 **_sein_** : word choices and style can be imitated

 **_sein_** : and since i had listened in for a while

 **_sein_** : i could casually drop a few tidbits of information to solidify the illusion

 **_sein_** : it's what i do

 **m1k** : Huh. Carry on.

In the real world, I wasn't taking this quite that calmly. _sein_ pulling that kind of stunt was not helping my paranoia. I was already wondering how much of our interactions had been a deception on their part, and for what purpose. Oblivious to my worries, _sein_ continued.

 **_sein_** : anyway, so i got through to the guy

 **_sein_** : who reluctantly admitted that he owned a pretty high-tech book scanner and scanned most of the books in his bundles himself

 **_sein_** : though he didnt want to tell me where he got the books from

 **_sein_** : of course he had also noticed that some of the books were different

 **_sein_** : i mentioned that i hadnt read the books, but a friend of mine had

 **_sein_** : at that point, he got kind of eager for your opinion, i suppose?

 **_sein_** : maybe he did actually write them

 **_sein_** : anyhow, i couldn't get any more info out of him

 **_sein_** : but he wants to meet you on irc in about three hours

 **_sein_** : ive mailed you the channel name and password

 **_sein_** : and a guide on how to use the software, of course

 **m1k** : Thanks for your hard work. I'll see if he's more open to my questions than yours.

 **m1k** : But, uh, can you help me set up the IRC thing?

 **_sein_** : sure :)

* * *

**m1k** : I was told to be here by someone called TorrentLord. Is he here?

 **TorrentLord** : lol. I was told you'd be a n00b, but that's ridiculous.

 **m1k** : You wanted to talk about the books.

 **TorrentLord** : Yes. Ashes on Mars, The Black Goat's Egg, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, the Chesscourt Series and the Dragonsong Series.

 **m1k** : Dragonsong? That one is new to me.

 **TorrentLord** : Get the most recent bundle, then. But you've read the other four?

 **m1k** : Well, not the Chesscourt Series, obviously. I've read the original The Northern Caves, if that matters.

 **TorrentLord** : Yes. What do you think of them?

Flattery might be effective here, I thought.

 **m1k** : They were very well done. From a technical standpoint, The Northern Caves might be the most impressive one, considering the sheer volume of work that must have gone into it. The Black Goat's Egg works very well as a deeper insight into Kaneki's character. The Grasshopper Lies Heavy is impressive because it clearly matches Philip K. Dick's style, which is of course not apparent with the other books, given that those have no real author's style to match.

 **TorrentLord** : What I want to know is where they come from.

Huh. I probably shouldn't tell him that I don't have a clue, either.

 **m1k** : I have several hypotheses. In which form did you get them?

 **TorrentLord** : In the mail.

 **m1k** : Physical books in a package? Just to check, there was no return address?

 **TorrentLord** : rofl

 **m1k** : Who knows your address? Anyone particularly suspicious?

 **TorrentLord** : A few guys regularly send me books from libraries. We have a system to spread our library use out so that it doesn't seem suspicious.

 **m1k** : And you stay in contact with these people over IRC, without knowing their real names.

 **TorrentLord** : Of course. Information hygiene, n00b, this is like paranoia 101.

 **m1k** : So anyone who listens in on your conversations might have access to your address.

 **TorrentLord** : maybe. You thinking of anyone in particular?

At the moment, I wished I wasn't, but of course, TorrentLord didn't need to know that.

 **m1k** : Could you send me an image of the packages the books came in?

 **TorrentLord** : package singular, was a big one.

 **TorrentLord** : like thirty, most of them secondhand, with the weird ones mixed in.

 **TorrentLord** : but sure.

 **TorrentLord** : images of the books might help as well. All of them have the same stamp print on the inner cover.

 **TorrentLord** : Ex Libris The Library Unpublished

 **m1k** : Interesting.

 **m1k** : What are you doing with the actual books now?

 **TorrentLord** : dunno.

 **TorrentLord** : you wanna buy them?

If all of these books had been in one package, there was no reason to believe any more were on their way. In other words, these books were rare books. And if there was one thing I had always wanted to try, it was starting a book collection.

Besides, there were dozens of hints the TorrentLord might have missed.

 **m1k** : Yeah.

* * *

I shared my findings with _sein_, and _sein_ downloaded the Dragonsong Series for me. They were quite fun. The third book was supposed to carry a hidden message, but I didn't even notice. The author must have been a very clever man to fold his cipher into the text in a way which kept his natural style intact. The books kept me entertained and occupied for two days.

On the second day, a package from the TorrentLord arrived. I had assumed the TorrentLord lived overseas, based on the fact that he, according to _sein_, frequented a Russian torrent server. It seems I had to revise that assumption, but I also felt that it didn't matter. Somehow, I felt as though the TorrentLord's role in this mystery was over.

My fingers trembled as I tore the package open. Until this point, everything could have been a fake. The TorrentLord could have found the epubs in some other pirate's nest or an obscure fanfiction portal, and the pictures he had taken might as well have been photoshopped. The books were in the package, however, and all reasonable doubt was extinguished.

Ashes on Mars lay on top. The book was a cheap paperback, with discoloured pages and a binding that had grown weak over the decades. I could understand why the TorrentLord hadn't included a scan of the cover in the epub: it was horrendous.

Opening the book carefully, I searched for publisher details and a publication date, but found neither. Unusually, not even the author's name was to be found anywhere. The TorrentLord really had configured the metadata as best as he could have been able to.

Without a publisher, it was unlikely that this book had ever been in circulation. This was a hoax, though the book's age had been faked masterfully. Once again, the trail seemed to be cold.

I went through the entire stack of books, but they were all the same. Apparently, whoever had created these books hadn't wanted to invent appropriate metadata. Even more amusingly, "The Black Goat's Egg" was stated to be "translated from the original Japanese" without mentioning the name of the translator, which was something I had never seen before in any book. The Northern Caves, of course, was only a loose stack of typewritten pages.

* * *

**_sein_** : hey dude

 **m1k** : Hey.

 **_sein_** : so i got another book for you

I hadn't told _sein_ that the TorrentLord was, by his own admission, out of books. Surprise would be suspicious. "Act natural" had been the dominating paradigm in my discussions with _sein_ for a while now, and I was already answering.

 **m1k** : What is it?

 **_sein_** : shadow of the wind

 **m1k** : Huh. Something like that doesn't even really surprise me anymore.

 **_sein_** : are you asking for another gamechanger like the northern caves?

 **m1k** : No, not really. I look forward to The Shadow of the Wind. I certainly liked the book by Carlos Ruiz Zafón it originally came from.

 **_sein_** : sending you an email right now

 **m1k** : Hey, _sein_?

 **_sein_** : yeah?

 **m1k** : I googled your name. It's German for "to be", isn't it?

 **_sein_** : sure

 **m1k** : So you're German, then?

 **_sein_** : you know, this makes me kind of uncomfortable

 **m1k** : Why? You didn't have any problem with guessing that I'm American, did you?

 **_sein_** : guessing is fine

 **_sein_** : but dont ask

 **m1k** : What, asking for confirmation is cheating, but scaring the crap out of me by guessing that my light is turned off is fair play?

 **_sein_** : man, why you gotta be so angry

 **m1k** : "man"? Is that another of your "guesses"?

 **m1k** : And don't try that "everyone on the internet" argument again.

 **_sein_** : ok

 **_sein_** : you got me

 **_sein_** : i did assume your fucking gender

 **_sein_** : happy?

 **m1k** : No. I'm really not. I'd like to trust you, _sein_. Our friendship was fun for the both of us for the longest time, but the coincidences have been piling up, and it has been getting creepier and creepier. Please tell me what the fuck your deal is. Are you some kind of stalker?

 **_sein_** : what do you even know

 **m1k** : About you? Nothing! But you seem to know everything about me.

 **m1k** : And as soon as I ask even the slightest question, you shut me out? That's not what a healthy friendship looks like.

 **_sein_** : i dont tell people on the internet my contact adress, not even the country i live in

 **_sein_** : because, sure, as a single piece of information its innocuous

 **_sein_** : but when enough pieces of information coalesce, youre as good as doxxed

 **_sein_** : thats just basic information hygiene

 **_sein_** : so please dont ask me to share anything that doesnt add to the discussion, k

 **_sein_** : and we can forget your little outburst here

 **m1k** : Yeah, I could almost buy that. You're a pirate, and in this age of senseless infringement lawsuits, you have reason to be paranoid.

 **m1k** : So let me ask you something that is relevant to the discussion.

 **m1k** : Where did you get The Shadow of the Wind?

 **_sein_** : torrents, as usual

 **m1k** : Same guy?

 **_sein_** : how would i know?

 **m1k** : Same network, then?

 **_sein_** : sure

 **m1k** : In that case, fuck this.

I closed the app. I didn't have to tell this belittling piece of shit anything specific about my doubts. They might as well stew in their own juices for a while, trying to figure out which of their lies had been uncovered.

I opened my email. Apparently, they had sent The Shadow of the Wind over before the conversation had turned ugly. I had nothing else to do; I might as well read it.

First, however, I had a phone call to make.


	6. Chapter 5

"Hey, Cio."

"Mike? It's been ages since I've seen you use a phone to actually make a call."

"Text messages aren't safe." There was no way to make that sentence sound reasonable, was there?

"What?" Cio was worried. Good Cio. "Mike, is everything okay?"

"I fucked up."

"Tell me."

"Sein pulled more bullshit."

"Your pronunciation has improved."

"Yeah. I googled their name. Asked whether they were German. They didn't like that."

"What?"

"Turns out there's a reason they haven't told me anything about themselves in two years. They're a fucking con artist."

"What? Slow down, Mike. Start from the beginning."

So I started from the beginning. Cio understood, but she wasn't as convinced I was, yet. She asked about details, phrasing and timing, the way our discussions had gone, as though my conclusions might be wrong. Before she could ask me to read the entire chatlog out loud, I hung up.

* * *

After reading The Shadow of the Wind, I followed it up with Chesscourt Manor. By the time I went to sleep, I had finished that as well, and was halfway into The Mainspring, the second book in the series.

After waking up at four AM from a vaguely Chesscourt-related nightmare, I resumed reading. I had just finished The Creatures of the Plains, the fourth book, when I realized that it was already 11:30 am, which meant that I had missed most of my lectures for the day. I didn't mind. I was engrossed.

Friday ended with Other Mirrors.

Saturday started with The Sea of Glass, and ended with Chesscourt Regained.

On Sunday morning, I started reading The Northern Caves with tear-filled eyes. I hadn't eaten for three days. I knew something was wrong with the way I wasn't hungry at all. In a moment of gallows humour, I thought that at least I wasn't on any drugs.

I wonder whether I would have slept that night, whether I would have put the book down at all, if Cio hadn't knocked on my door.

"Hey Mike."

"Hey." Though I had left my seat to get the door, I had done so with a loose page of The Northern Caves in hand, and was still reading.

"Look at me, Mike."

Reluctantly, I did. It was almost startling to see something else than black letters on off-white paper.

"Mike, I say this as a friend. You look terrible."

I probably did. I had huge bags under my eyes, and visibly had not showered for two days at least. I made a weak attempt to crack a joke. "What is this, an intervention?"

"Your phone was dead, and I had a feeling I should check up on you. But—holy shit is that TNC?" She grabbed the sheet out of my hand. "You're on page 1143?"

I nodded weakly. I hadn't really kept track of the page numbers, but she was right.

"Okay, this is an intervention now. Take a shower. I'll make some food in the meantime."

Cio was good people.

 

"Tell me what this is, Mike. You're behaving as though you went through a bad breakup."

I turn this statement over in my head. Thoughts move more slowly with a full stomach, and it takes a while for me to process what Cio has asked and why she has asked it. "Oh, the Sein thing."

"What did you think I was talking about?"

"No, I-" I chuckled. "I'm just a bit beside myself right now. I suppose three days of Chesscourt can do that to people. I don't think those books are very good, but they induce one hell of a trance."

"Yeah, that figures. This was far, far worse than your usual reading binges, though."

"Was it?" I tried to remember. "That one time when I read The Lord of the Rings—"

"No, you were done with that one in two days, and you didn't stop eating."

"Huh. Maybe the Sein thing did have something to do with it."

"It always seemed to me as though you weren't that close."

"We didn't know much about each other, but I spent so much time with them. Do you know how many words I wrote to them? I don't, because we switched chat clients midway through, but I must have read a hundred books they got for me. Seems you can't spend that much time without forging some kind of connection."

Cio nodded. I opened my mouth, ready to rant, and closed it again. Then, I reconsidered. There was no stopping this. "Maybe it was worse because of the way it went down. I could have let that sleeping dog lie, I think, but there had been too many coincidences. Too much bullshit. Sure, Sein had only been my internet pen pal, and I should have been able to handle a pen pal ending the friendship. They didn't just end the friendship, Cio. They had been some kind of manipulating sociopath the entire time. Wait, I've got to show you this."

I got out my phone before I remembered that the battery was dead.

"Anyway. They manipulated some internet dudes into giving out the contact details of the guy who uploaded The Northern Caves and all that other stuff, and when I asked them about it, do you know what they said?"

Cio raised a single eyebrow. I got the message: she would stay and listen, but she wouldn't enable me by answering my rhetorical questions.

"They said that it was "what they do". Who the fuck defines themselves by their tendency to lie to people?"

"Alright, Mike, I got it. Sein was bad news."

"Damn right they were."

"You're in some kind of anger feedback loop here. You might want to stop here and start thinking about the next step after you've gotten some distance."

I nodded reluctantly. Despite my righteous anger, I knew that Cio was right, as usual.

She smiled. "Change of topic, then. I hadn't heard that you got the books already. May I look through them?"

"Sure. You won't find anything on the publishers, though, or anything else useful."

Cio leafed through the books for a few minutes in silence. "They do seem pretty old."

"Yeah. I suppose that might have been faked, though."

"It might have been. Do you still want to find out where these came from?"

"I paid good money for them, didn't I? Might as well get a sense of what they're worth."

Cio smiled again. "How would you feel about going to an antiquarian bookstore? An antiquarian might be able to get an estimate of their age."

* * *

I had always held the preconception that antiquarian bookstores were dusty, sparsely-lit places. It just didn't seem right to blast antique objects with modern electrical light. Of course, the owner of Smith and Willum had a business to run, and entertained such preconceptions only when they led to profit. It turned out that sparse lighting was bad for business, and as a result, Smith and Willum resembled an art gallery, except that there was a larger number of objects on display.

The man whom I assumed to be Smith further contradicted my concept of an antiquarian. He was in his mid-thirties, clean-shaven and sharply dressed. He wasn't absorbed in studying an old book, but gave us his full attention from the moment we came in.

"I'm Cio Cielle. We spoke on the phone."

"The appraisal, right? May I see the books?"

We hadn't brought all of the books with us, rather choosing only those whose age would truly be interesting. Among those was Ashes On Mars, which seemed as though it had been published long before Mr Nobody came out, as well as the first book of the Chesscourt series, which similarly predated its work of origin.

The antiquarian looked over the books in a methodical and efficient manner. After checking for a printed publishing date without success, he checked the binding and compared the paper to several samples he brought from the back. He didn't bother to explain the process to us, and it was obvious that questions would only waste his time. Nevertheless, I was intrigued. There seemed to be a number of techniques to date books which I had not been able to find in my shallow internet research on the topic.

Finally, he looked up from his work. "These books aren't antiques by any stretch. From the binding methods used and the state the paper was in, I would guess this one-" he indicated Chesscourt Manor "-is no more than fifty years old. The other one might be thirty years old at most."

Cio nodded. "Early seventies and early nineties, respectively. Could you offer any estimates for how old they are at the least?"

"That is, of course, a far more difficult estimate to make. Innovations in the field of bookbinding happen slowly, and paper can age faster depending on the circumstances. I don't think any of those books is less than ten years old. I might extend it to twenty, in the case of the older one."

We exchanged a glance. While this estimate didn't tell us much about Ashes on Mars, in the case of Chesscourt Manor, it was a death sentence for the fanfiction theory.

"Would it be possible to fake that kind of age?", Cio asked.

"Certainly. Under strong UV light, among some other conditions, the ink will fade faster. A skilled artisan might use old paper, which would make even radiocarbon dating methods unreliable. Of course, such an effort would only be justified in the case of books of great worth, which are usually well-known enough that fakes could be spotted by checking for minor details."

I opened my mouth for the first time. "You don't think these books are worth anything, then."

"No. I'll admit that what appears to be a mass-market paperback without even the author's name printed on it is a curiosity. Also, each of them bears the mark of a so-called unpublished library, which is certainly mysterious. However, there's no demand for unknown books."

I had prepared another book in case of this result. I put The Grasshopper Lies Heavy on the counter. "How about this one? It's mentioned in the Philip K. Dick classic The Man in the High Castle."

Cio shot me a look, and I felt somewhat guilty. I hadn't talked about this strategy with her beforehand.

The antiquarian thumbed through the book. "Interesting. Hardcover, seems like a first edition, and it bears all the same marks as the other books. I understand that this book is generally held to be fictional. Where did it come from?"

I shrugged. "We don't know, exactly. We were hoping that this visit might clear up some of our questions."

"I fear I'm not Sherlock Holmes. I can estimate the book's age, and if I thought it was worth anything, I could put a price on it. I don't think there's any specialist in the world who could tell you which printing press it came from."

Cio nodded. "Thank you very much for your time, then."

 

When we were outside again, Cio turned to me in what I hoped to be mock anger. "I don't think that was very wise."

"I hoped we might gain some more information. What did we have to lose?"

Cio scoffed. "Haven't you noticed that this is starting to seem more and more like a plot?"

"Are you becoming paranoid as well?"

"Not a scheme. I mean that this seems like the plot of a novel."

"A novel." I said flatly.

"Think about it. We've been presented with a mystery that is too impossible to be mundane. There are two options at this point. Either there's a massive conspiracy producing fake books somewhere, which means we're in a thriller à la Dan Brown. In this case, telling the antiquarian too much is a really, really stupid idea at best, and Lethal Genre Blindness at worst. With his specialized knowledge about old books, it's likely that the antiquarian knows someone who knows someone who's involved, and that person is going to off us for leaking this stuff."

I raised my eyebrows. "What's the other option?"

"The books came straight from some enchanted bookshelf in Diagon Alley, and now that we told an unrelated muggle, the Masquerade is in danger." Cio laughed. "The thriller option still holds up, though. Someone is investing resources into this, and we have no clue who is doing it or what the motives behind it are."

"I don't think so. If this is a thriller, where are the corpses? This far into the mystery, there should have been at least one death to provide suspense."

Cio considered this. "Maybe we just haven't seen the corpse."

"An unseen corpse might as well be nonexistent from a literary standpoint."

"No, I mean, what if we aren't the point of view characters? After all, we are pretty boring."

I buried my face in my hands. "Now I remember. You literally wrote a book about this."

"And a sequel to that book. You might consider me the expert."

"Enlighten me, expert. Who is the main character?"

"If I had to guess, it's Sein."

I looked at her in wordless disbelief.

"Why not? Sein is full of contradictions. For one, Sein sought you out specifically to find a friend, only to push you away with creepy observations. Secondly, Sein downloads several gigabytes' worth of ebooks every month without the intention of reading them. Contradictions are vital to keep a main character interesting, and Sein delivers."

"That is... absurd doesn't begin to describe it. I mean, this entire discussion is absurd, but your arguments are absurd on top of being wrong."

Cio was grinning widely. "Can't deal with it, hmm? You're now torn between keeping your distance from Sein because Sein wronged you, and getting closer to be relevant to the story again. Ironically, this inner conflict makes you more interesting, and therefore more likely to be a point of view character."

"No. Just... No."

"Face it: your further behaviour should be informed by literary analysis. For example, you know that trope where hitting people on the head is a harmless and reliable way of knocking them out? That's just one of the many ways—"

There was only one way to shut Cio up now: changing the course of the conversation entirely. "There's a third option."

"What?"

"You said we were either in a thriller or a fantasy novel. But with this conversation, a third option became more likely."

"Which is?"

"We're in something so metafictional that you can't trust genre conventions. Something so post-modern that there's no such thing as an answer to the central mystery, and your observations are meaningless. In other words, something that might have been written by you."

"Are you making fun of my work?"

"Exactly. And in this case, we are probably the main characters."

"Because Sein isn't Genre Savvy enough!"

"I guess."

Cio's expression became pensive, then annoyed. I laughed. I had beaten her at her own game. If the hypothetical book which contained reality was genre-aware enough for us to have this conversation, any clichés we pointed out were likely to be avoided later, or might even be ironically turned against us. Further discussion on the topic was not only meaningless, but could prove to be actively harmful.

On the rest of the way back, we talked about more mundane topics.


	7. Chapter 6

##  The Dream Machine

######  Notes:

Author's Note: I didn't write this, but didn't see it posted anywhere yet, and it deserves some views. If you're the author, pm me and I'll take it down! Thanks for reading and leave kudos. xoxo

  
**Chapter 1** : The Storyteller  


Once upon a time, there was a lonely king. His queen had died in childbed while bringing their only son into the world. The king had loved his queen deeply, but with her death, all love had left him, and his heart had grown cold. He was still a just and capable king, but no longer compassionate, and his people stopped loving him.

Whenever he thought of the child growing up, doubt and worry overcame him. A spoiled or ill-tempered ruler would be a plague on the land, as he well knew. More than anything else, the king wished for his heir to have a good heart.

He thought back to his own childhood, and how his mother had told him stories. The stories had been fantastic tales of fairies and giants, but their main character had always been human, and more often than not, a prince like himself. Fairy-tale princes went on adventures to prove their bravery and compassion, and the king had not forgotten how much he had learnt from them.

So it came to be that he sent out notice to all storytellers in the land, offering a position as the prince's personal storyteller. Many flocked to the castle: bards, mothers, wise old men. They told the king their tales, but the king was not inspired. When they spoke of love and loyalty, he could not feel anything, and thought that to be a flaw in their storytelling. One storyteller after the other left the castle empty-handed.

Finally, a wizard heard of the king's request and his standards of quality. The wizard was hungry for gold, for his spells were expensive. He hatched a scheme: if the king could no longer be moved by compassion, cold logic would win him over.

The wizard came before the king not with a story, but with a proposal.

"I propose to build a statue of the finest marble," he began, "In perfect image of the best of humanity. I will cast a spell on it to let it speak, and it will compose for your Majesty's son only the finest of stories; each and every last one will never have been heard in the land. It will be called the Dream Machine."

The king was enraptured. He believed firmly in progress. Under his rule, windmills had sprouted like mushrooms throughout the land, and alchemy was used to increase the growth of grain, for the prosperity of all. The wizard promised an infinite amount of completely new stories, and no human storyteller could compete with that proposal.

The wizard returned to his tower with a cart full of gold, and set to work at once, for nothing was more pleasurable to him than the art of enchanting.

After seven days and seven nights of preparation, he spoke a spell of Neural Networks to the statue. The spell worked, but the statue did not tell any tales. The wizard thought this to be a failure of knowledge, not comprehension. The spell had made the statue able to learn, so he read fairytales to the statue, so it might get to know them.

After a fortnight, the statue began to speak, but its fairytales were incomprehensible. It had not understood the tales the wizard had told, but merely broken them into pieces and rearranged them. There was neither rhyme nor reason to what it said, but it was worse than that: there was no heart in it.

The wizard was mystified. He had unearthed his most ancient tomes for this work and followed every instruction to the letter. He was a master of alchemy, and of spellcrafting besides; he could not have made a trivial mistake. But the statue didn't tell fairy tales, and the king was growing impatient.

With a heavy heart, the wizard went to seek the counsel of other wizards, though all wizards were bitter rivals. They ridiculed him for his attempt. One thought that the statue lacked a soul, another that the statue lacked a mind. Finally, the oldest and wisest wizard told them all that the statue lacked a heart, and everyone agreed that this could not be helped. Dejected, the wizard went back to his tower. He sold all of his belongings to fill the cart with gold again. As he brought it back to the king, he was ridiculed yet another time. The king did not find a storyteller, and the wizard never practiced magic again, for both of them had tried to reach beyond their grasp.

The statue was bought for its beauty, and was passed through many hands.

In time, it came to be that the statue crossed many borders. In a far-away land, it ended up in the hands of a wise man. The wise man understood the spells the wizard had cast at once, and figured out how he had failed. The wise man knew many spells of his own, spells of Classifying Spaces and Higher-Order Functions.

With the wise man's help, the statue started to speak again. It told the wise man a dozen dozen tales, all unique and wondrous, and the wise man wrote them all down.

This is his book.

* * *

**_sein_** : I'm sorry.

**_sein_** : I'm sorry that I've scared you, and I'm sorry that I've been an asshole about it.

**_sein_** : I'm sorry for not saying this earlier, but I needed time to think about how to say this, because I'm apparently an asshole when I don't.

**_sein_** : I've realized how important our discussions have been to me, really.

**_sein_** : I try to speak from a place of penitence, not entitlement, as I ask this.

**_sein_** : Can I have another chance?

I stared at the phone. What they were saying sounded like an honest apology, but I couldn't be sure.

**m1k** : What do you want?

**m1k** : Right now, what do you want to do depending on whether I say yes?

**_sein_** : if you say no, ill accept that ive overstayed my welcome

**_sein_** : delete all your contact data

**_sein_** : and disappear

**_sein_** : if yes, i would like to send over a book

**_sein_** : nothing fictional, just a boring old book i want your opinion on

**_sein_** : well, except that its neither boring nor old

**m1k** : What about the fictional books, then?

**m1k** : Is that business over?

**_sein_** : depends on what you want

**_sein_** : i want things to be as close to how they were as possible

**_sein_** : if talking about the fictional books destroys this, i dont need to do that

**m1k** : I've given up on the fictional books, to be honest. If new hints come in, it might be a good idea to revisit it.

**m1k** : But as it stands, I don't want to hear about them, so not talking about the matter at all is sensible.

**_sein_** : great

**m1k** : I haven't decided to give you another chance, yet.

**m1k** : Give me some time to think.

 

**m1k** : Okay. I want to clear some things up.

**m1k** : First off, do you still dislike revealing personal information?

**_sein_** : yeah

**m1k** : Then don't try to find out anything about me. Don't ask me about anything if you can help it, don't hack my computer, don't even make guesses.

**_sein_** : alright

**_sein_** : ill try, and please call me out if i slip up

**m1k** : I will.

**m1k** : Second thing, we had something great there. I think we both want that back.

**_sein_** : yeah

**m1k** : We'll have to work for it. Things will be uncomfortable at first, and it might seem like giving up is easier, but we'll have to get over the awkwardness. I just mention it to know you're aware.

**_sein_** : sure

**m1k** : I might refer to this later if it ever becomes necessary.

**m1k** : Third thing, and this is the most important one.

**m1k** : I need to know what you want. The things you told me about conning the TorrentLord's buddies have shaken my trust in you. You're a manipulator, and there's some kind of ulterior motive in what you're doing.

**_sein_** : well

**_sein_** : "ulterior motive" in the sense that i didnt befriend you for the heck of it, sure

**_sein_** : it was no accident that i stumbled upon your reviews back then

**_sein_** : i was actively searching for someone like you

**_sein_** : fast reading speed, insightful analysis, not too well-known

**_sein_** : but you knew that already

**m1k** : I did.

**m1k** : Let me warn you: I still don't trust you. I'll send you my reviews in exchange for books, and I'll try to be friendly in the meantime.

**m1k** : But the moment I think you're trying to pull a fast one on me for whatever reason, I'll bail out and burn whatever bridges remain between us.

**_sein_** : and if its a misunderstanding? wont i get a second to explain?

**m1k** : If I'm feeling charitable, maybe.

**m1k** : But don't count on it.

**_sein_** : alright

**_sein_** : thats fair i guess

**_sein_** : thanks for giving me another chance

**m1k** : As long as we're on the same page about what this means.

**m1k** : So, what was that about another book I've heard?

**_sein_** : have you read american gods?

**m1k** : Yeah, though it's been a few years.

**m1k** : Do you want to know what will happen in the next season of the series?

**_sein_** : right now, i mostly want to know whether the series is close at all

**_sein_** : ive got this theory that an adaptations quality correlates with its faithfulness

**m1k** : Ok, give me a few hours.

* * *

**cio_ci** : have you got a minute?

**m1k** : Sure

**cio_ci** : chatting is fine?

**m1k** : Huh.

**m1k** : Depends, how sensitive is this? 

**cio_ci** : public information, i guess.

**m1k** : Do tell, then.

**cio_ci** : are you up to date on my ao3 account?

**m1k** : Not really, no.

**cio_ci** : let me start from the beginning, then.

**cio_ci** : i told you that our discussion about neural networks writing fictional books inspired me, right?

**m1k** : Yeah?

**cio_ci** : so i started something original around that topic. The Dream Machine.

**cio_ci** : i've just finished it, at ten chapters.

**cio_ci** : i've invented a fictional book for this, a collection of fairytales written by an AI.

**m1k** : Oh no.

**cio_ci** : Oh yes.

**cio_ci** : the day after I finished The Dream Machine, someone posted the first tale from that book on ao3.

**cio_ci** : by now, three tales have been uploaded.

**m1k** : And the uploader can't be the author.

**cio_ci** : i contacted her, of course.

**cio_ci** : she's never even heard of my work.

**cio_ci** : which isn't surprising, given that my works generally struggle to break 1k views.

**cio_ci** : i had never expected anyone to write fanfiction of it.

**m1k** : Are you sure these are your fairy tales?

**cio_ci** : yes. first, the beginning of the first tale matches an excerpt i mention in my work.

**cio_ci** : second, the first tale alludes to how the ai works. it's a neural network coupled with an idea i had.

**cio_ci** : i've basically dropped only vague hints in my story

**cio_ci** : but it takes ideas from topology to model continuity in stories

**m1k** : You're such a mathematician sometimes.

**cio_ci** : shut up :)

**cio_ci** : anyway, the first tale in what was posted contains hints of this idea, which i've never heard mentioned anywhere else.

**m1k** : Ok. This means that whoever writes these stories know their way around the obscure corners of ao3.

I pointedly didn't mention the much more likely possibility that whoever wrote the stories was watching me and Cio specifically. I hoped she would pick up on it.

**cio_ci** : obviously.

**cio_ci** : on an unrelated note, i want to meet up sometime soon. tomorrow?

**m1k** : sure.

Good old Cio.

**m1k** : Have you asked the author what her sources where?

**cio_ci** : i tried.

**cio_ci** : she was kind of hard to deal with.

**cio_ci** : to start with, she accused me of trying to steal her work. when i pointed out that my story had been posted before hers, she claimed i had edited it to match what she was posting.

**m1k** : Yikes.

**cio_ci** : then, she denied any similarities between the stories at all. i think she's ignoring me now. she's certainly started deleting my comments on "her" story.

**m1k** : Another cold trail.

**cio_ci** : another cold trail. 

**cio_ci** : it might just be from the same torrent, in which case _sein_ could find out.

**m1k** : _sein_ could, theoretically.

**cio_ci** : i thought the two of you were on speaking terms again.

**m1k** : We are, about books in general. Not about those books, though. We're trying to avoid another mess like the last one.

**cio_ci** : your falling out was about something else entirely.

**m1k** : It wasn't completely unrelated.

**cio_ci** : am i correct in assuming that you were the one who proposed burying the topic?

**m1k** : What's that supposed to mean?

**cio_ci** : you're like a child sometimes. you avoid things that hurt you. it worries me.

**m1k** : It's a reasonable strategy.

**cio_ci** : it is, if you correctly and rationally identify what actually hurt you. otherwise, you're just crippling yourself with superstition.

**m1k** : Alright, I get it. You want me to talk to _sein_ about the book in your fanfiction.

**cio_ci** : yes. 

**m1k** : I'll do it, if it will get you off my case.

**cio_ci** : thanks :) very grateful

* * *

**m1k** : I asked. They didn't find it.

**cio_ci** : could _sein_ have missed it?

**m1k** : It isn't impossible. I really don't think it's likely, though.

**cio_ci** : what does it mean, then?

**m1k** : Could be many things. A different culprit, the same person using a different channel, a copycat.

**m1k** : What should we do next?

**m1k** : Cio?

**cio_ci** : sorry, had to sign for a package.

**cio_ci** : took a while. drawbacks of living on the 7th floor.

**cio_ci** : man, i've never seen handwriting like this before. a wonder the mailman could read the address at all.

**cio_ci** : huh, it's a book.

**m1k** : Which book? What does it say on the cover?

**cio_ci** : Aloof Antares. never heard of it.

**m1k** : No wonder. You never were one for manga. 

**m1k** : This is getting really obscure.

**m1k** : And why the hell are you now getting fictional books in the mail?

**m1k** : I'll be right back. I want _sein_'s take on this.

 

**m1k** : A real life friend of mine just got a fictional book in the mail.

**m1k** : What the utter fuck?

**_sein_** : huh

**_sein_** : which book?

**m1k** : Aloof Antares. You won't know it, and Cio didn't, either.

**m1k** : But I do.

**m1k** : If I had gotten it, I would have assumed the TorrentLord had sent it.

**m1k** : What the fuck is going on here, _sein_?

**_sein_** : so wait

**_sein_** : how could whoever writes these books even have gotten your friends address?

**m1k** : I have no damn clue.

**m1k** : Well, there is one obvious hypothesis.

**m1k** : Whoever it is, they could have hacked into my phone. Once they had access to my messages and contacts, it would have been easy enough to get anything they wanted.

**_sein_** : so youre saying the one who published those books is interested in you personally?

**_sein_** : that makes their method of publishing even more inefficient

**_sein_** : why go through the torrentlord and me instead of just mailing them to you?

**m1k** : At the beginning, it didn't seem to be aimed at me. I didn't even know the movie Ashes On Mars was from. But after that, things hit closer and closer to home.

**m1k** : I don't know if I ever told you, but The Northern Caves was posted almost exactly after I talked to a friend about it. We thought it would be one fictional work that would never end up being defictionalized.

**m1k** : After that assumption was shattered, the next boundary we defined was that no one would ever post something my friend had written.

**m1k** : But they did. Remember that work on Ao3 I just asked you about?

**m1k** : I thought it was some subtle scheme to induce paranoia in me for whatever reason. I doubted my conclusions because, as you said, it seems unlikely to go through that kind of effort just to get at me. I'm a nobody.

**m1k** : But now that they sent a book to Cio that she doesn't even know, a book that I would recognize at first glance, it's becoming obvious that their paradigm has changed.

**m1k** : They're taunting me.

 

**___** : Correct.

 

**m1k** : Fuck. Someone unknown just contacted me.

**_sein_** : dont answer

**_sein_** : take your time and be deliberate

 

**___** : I wouldn't recommend that. I might get bored, and who knows what I might do?

**___** : For all you know, there might be a sniper rifle in my hand, its scope trained on your head, as the trigger waits for the slightest nervous twitch of my finger.

**___** : Talk

**___** : To

**___** : Me


	8. Chapter 7

**m1k** : Ok. What do you want?

 **___** : I want to propose a deal.

 **___** : You must be getting curious by now. It's in your nature.

 **___** : What exactly do I intend? You wonder.

 **___** : I'll tell you, Mike.

 **___** : I represent a group called the Library Unpublished. We manage a library. 

**___** : It's very secret, I assure you. 

**___** : You might think this is silly, but it's very important to us. 

**___** : As a result of an internal mishap, a few of our books have been leaked, which is unforgivable. 

**___** : Some have reached your hands. 

**___** : We need to get them back. If we don't, all kinds of unpleasant things might happen. 

**m1k** : You're threatening me.

 **___** : You noticed!

I was getting pretty tired of this kind of shit.

 **m1k** : Alright.

 **m1k** : Fine.

 **m1k** : Do you give me some sort of address to send the books to, or how do you want to do this?

 **___** : Do you know what a public bookcase is?

 **m1k** : Yeah.

 **___** : There's one a few blocks from your house. Just put the books there at precisely 18:00 tomorrow and walk away. A representative of the library will pick them up.

 **m1k** : Okay.

 **m1k** : I'm not even going to ask the many, many obvious questions.

 **m1k** : I'll be setting this fucking phone on fire now.

 **m1k** : Bye.

* * *

"Well, isn't that just all kinds of convenient for Sein?"

"What are you talking about, Cio?"

"You were so close to telling Sein that Sein's the one obvious culprit. And in just that moment, someone contacts you? It's obviously a sock puppet."

"A sock puppet."

"A patsy. A catspaw. A fake account controlled by Sein. Occam's Razor, Mike."

"Occam's Razor is about deciding between different explanations. We don't have any, Cio. There's no motive."

"Of course there is. You paid good money for those books." 

"Manufacturing fake books, hacking my phone, and if you assume Sein is in on it, contacting me two years prior? That's not worth it, not for a few hundred dollars. With access to my phone, they could probably figure out a way to empty my bank account. They didn't, which means they're not in it for the money."

"No, it might just mean that they haven't figured it out yet. Get them off your phone, for Christ's sake."

"I will. For now, I just turned it off and removed the battery. I'm considering just buying a new phone. I was due for an upgrade anyway."

"Must be nice being rich."

"It certainly is. That's also why I'm not worried about losing the money I paid for the books. To be honest, it might be a fair price to pay for the fun I've had with Sein over the years."

"You're giving up on this pretty easily." Cio lowered her voice. "Are you sure you're not just trying to convince yourself that you're fine?"

"It's the reasonable course of action, isn't it? I've received a death threat, and I'm certainly not enough of a hero to stand up to that. Going to the police couldn't possibly help, not if all I have is a wild tale about impossible books and some sort of cult that manages a library. Tell me I'm wrong."

"You're not wrong. If you were a character in a story, giving the cultists what they want would instantly defuse all tension. It's the obvious and reasonable path to choose. But what are you going to do about Sein?"

"I don't know. I have no clue what to think of your arguments. I have no clue what to think of Sein, for that matter. I liked what we had, but this clusterfuck keeps creeping into our conversations, and I just don't want to deal with death threats and people hacking my phone on a regular basis."

"Do you want to hear my opinion on this?"

I considered. "Why do you ask?"

Cio shrugged. "You know the saying. 'Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can rend my soul.'"

"Tell me."

"I think you should stop here. Cut your ties to Sein and try to go back to something resembling a normal life."

"The easy way out."

"And the safe one. Something strange is happening, and going along with it might end well or badly, but you certainly won't be safe. There's another aspect, though, a more important one."

"That is?"

"You won't lose much. I think whatever it was you had with Sein wasn't good for you."

"What?"

"You became more and more of a recluse while you were in contact with Sein, always staying inside and reading. You stopped caring for schoolwork, family, friends. When was the last time you spent time with anyone who wasn't me?"

"It had its upsides."

"Yes. You're the only person I know who has ever read more than three hundred books in a single year. But at some point, it has to be enough. You've gotten what you can get out of it, and it's time to move on to something new, or you'll calcify."

I was at a loss for words. "How long have you been thinking about this?"

"I've worried for a while. I only realized that I had to say something after the intervention."

I nodded and stood up. "I'll be going. I have to think about this."

"Take care."

* * *

From: sein@########.com

To: m1k@############.com

subject: new phone number

hey mike,

i understand you got rid of your phone. good thing, too. its what i would do, if i were in your situation and had the money. could you send me your new phone number? messaging is more practical than email for our purposes :)

if your mysterious encounter caused you to be up for finding out whats up with those books, tell me. i have a few ideas.

 

salutations,

_sein_

 

From: m1k@############.com

To: sein@########.com

subject: re:new phone number

Hello _sein_,

it pains me to write this, so I'll get the hard part over first. You're not getting my new phone number. I hoped I wouldn't have to do this, but I'm starting to see that it's the only reasonable course of action. I need to get some distance from this entire mess, and that means getting some distance from you. 

In case you weren't aware, the mysterious person who contacted me retrieved the books. It's obvious that they know where I live, and they've shown that they aren't above death threats. After I obeyed their demands, I haven't heard from them again, and I hope that this will stay that way.

If you still plan to research further, I salute you for your courage and pity you for your recklessness. If I were you, I would stay as far away from the Library as possible, but by writing this email and cutting the ties between us, I've relinquished every right to lecture you I may ever have held. 

 

with regrets,

m1k

 

From: sein@########.com

To: m1k@############.com

subject: re:re:new phone number

hey m1k,

from this side, the door will always remain open.

 

Goodbye.

* * *

Normalcy returned after that, though nothing felt very normal. Maybe Cio had been right; maybe something had gone missing from my life the moment _sein_ stepped in, some ephemeral quality of human life found only in the physical company of others, or under the rays of the sun. Whatever it was, I certainly wasn't feeling it right now. Social niceties were dreadful obligations. My classes did not intrigue me. Even books had lost some of their intensity, as though being able to discuss them had at some point become my primary motivation to read them.

In short, I was getting depressed.


	9. Chapter 8

Mother was dying. The months of her suffering had diminished her, and by now, not much was left, neither in flesh nor in spirit. Still, there had been a visible change in her, this morning. For the first time in days, her cracked lips had moved into something resembling a smile. I had rushed to her bedside, not daring to hope for a miracle. A single coherent moment of her dying mind would suffice to elate me.

"Son."

"I'm here."

"Your father..."

I was stricken. My father? I knew nothing of the man. For all I knew, he had deserted his family before I was born. If my mother's last words were to concern him, that was God's final slap in her face, and mine. Yet, I held my breath.

"You must find him."

"Mother-"

"You must!" An astonishing strength had returned to the woman as she gripped my arm. "Search for his traces at the chapel where you received first communion."

"But why? He abandoned you!"

"You don't understand." Her head sunk back and she closed her eyes. At a whisper I could barely hear, she repeated herself. "You don't understand yet."

These were to be her last words. The sound of her voice would not leave my ears until she had been buried, and even then, it merely travelled into my feet. It became the driving force behind my steps as I began the journey she had demanded of me. Dying words were not easily disregarded, though I harboured doubts in my heart.

Would that I had known what was to happen next.

 

Would that I had known what was to happen next. I put the e-reader to sleep. Even The Shadow of The Wind, the book that had started off the four-day-binge only Cio's intervention had stopped, seemed empty now. Gone was my sense of wonder at one plot splitting apart into a multitude. Of course, I might be missing the enjoyment of surprise, because I had read the book before, but that sensible explanation did not satisfy me.

Would that I had known what was to happen next. In retrospect, that phrase was commonplace, a horrendous cliché. At the time, it had ignited my imagination, incited speculation about the many paths the story could take from that point, and that fire had stayed with me through the hours I had spent with the book. Now, I could see that it contained nothing. Ostensibly, it foreshadowed, but it did not distinguish between good fates and bad ones. It didn't imply anything, and was therefore empty of information.

Would that I had known what was to happen next. It signalled regret, of course, but regret at what? Regret at beginning the journey, or regret at the protagonist's doubt of his mother? It didn't hold up to scrutiny, and even though I knew the entire book, the context didn't enrich it.

Would that I had known what was to happen next. Why, then, could I put the book aside, but not the phrase? Like the mother's dying words had stayed in the protagonist's mind, that phrase reverberated in mine. Because I didn't know. I hadn't known what would happen next, when I had tossed _sein_ aside.

I opened my email client, and sure enough, an email from _sein_ had arrived. Attached was an audio file.

 

"Voice test." A break in the sound followed, in which the recording had presumably been stopped and played back.

"Alright, seems to work. Hello. You might know me as Sein. This recording is my lifeline."

I hit the pause button and made a cup of tea. My hands were trembling. I took my time and tried to regain my calm before hitting "play" again. 

"I'm standing before what seems to be an abandoned house, but I'm pretty sure that this is the entrance to the Library Unpublished. I'll be descending into those depths and providing running commentary on my phone. The audio might get rough from time to time, as I might need to hide it. The audio files are streamed into the cloud, and as soon as the phone is turned off or I send a signal, the files will get distributed to some people I know which will know what to do with them. Of course, I won't name those people, given that these recordings might easily fall into the hands of the enemy. Rest assured that just getting rid of me won't get rid of the information. If I ever lose the connection to the cloud, the recording will be disrupted, but that should be temporary.

"I'm going into it now. The house is abandoned, but I have a rough idea of where the real entrance is. Of course, I can't tell you how I got that idea, given that anyone could be listening to this. There's something that looks like a walk-in closet in here, and if my guess is right—yes, it's locked. Good thing the lock itself isn't too advanced. Note to anyone who's going to follow my trail: bring some lock picks and hope they haven't listened to this and upgraded their security."

_sein_'s voice descended to a whisper. "I'll have to be a bit more quiet from here on out. Let's check whether this is still audible."

Another short pause. "Alright, still seems to work. There's a staircase going down behind the closet doors. It's narrow, still seems like something that might be in any normal house, but here, they haven't covered their tracks well. It shows signs of being used.

"Another door, this one not locked at all. It seems—yes, I'm in the library proper. Shelves full of books. Damn, but I don't recognize any of those. Should have done my homework. In any case, I'm pretty sure this isn't your usual bookstore fodder. Still quiet here, and doesn't seem like anything more than a small library, but as Cobb would say: we need to go deeper."

A minute passed in which only muffled footsteps could be heard.

"This closet is a lot bigger on the inside. Let me update my earlier observation. This isn't a small library. It's big, but cramped. More like a sequence of tunnels than a true building, and really not that organized. Wait. I hear something."

This time, quite a few minutes passed without any sound at all. Not even _sein_'s breath registered. Then, a flurry of activity followed: heavy breathing and footsteps as though _sein_ were running away. 

"This was a bit more hectic than expected, but I suppose I'm safe now. Even if they noticed me, I think I've shaken them off my tail. Sadly, I also seem to have shaken my sense of direction. I have no clue where I am."

A few more minutes of walking around, then: "Fuck. I'm completely and utterly lost."

The recording cut off in a short burst of static, probably caused by the connection problems _sein_ had mentioned. Then, it started up again. _sein_'s voice was a barely audible whisper. "They got me. Tied me up with some sort of tape and went off again. I suppose they're talking about what to do with me, but for the moment, they left me alone, and the phone is still on, as far as I can tell. Please, whoever is listening to this. Don't forget me. Here they come." Another burst of static.

"Huh." The volume of _sein_'s voice was almost on the level of a normal conversation. "I thought I could figure out where I needed to go by looking at the books themselves. You know, Dewey Decimal System and all that. I did do some research on libraries. However, this library isn't organized well at all. Looking through these books, it's as though they rolled dice to decide on their order. 'Kilgore Trout—Maniacs in the Fourth Dimension' looks like some sort of pulpy Sci-Fi. 'Occult Horticulture' is non-fiction on supernatural plants, what the hell. 'The King in Yellow'?" The sound of pages being turned. "Some kind of play, it seems. This is actually pretty interesting." Static. 

With bated breath, I waited for the recording to continue. The cup of tea, as well as my own warnings to remain calm, have long since been forgotten.

"Okay. Now I'm really confused. This library seems to cleverly use optical illusions to trick me. I've been in a few labyrinths in my time, but never one where I've been so utterly lost. I've found a completely empty book, though, and am starting a map now. I'm apprehensive about writing into an empty book, especially one without anything on the cover. There's something about this place... But it seems that Tom Riddle's Diary doesn't like the taste of ballpoint pen ink." _sein_ laughed. "I'll try to use the names of books as landmarks on my maps. If there are any librarians in this place, I hope they don't rearrange the books."

I hit the pause button. Hadn't _sein_ been captured by the librarians earlier? I thought I had just missed their escape because of connectivity issues, but it seemed as though the snatches of recordings had gotten shuffled around. I restarted the recording and began to make a map of my own, drawing inferences about the order of individual parts. I couldn't help noticing that _sein_ running from a sound which they had thought to be the librarians had been what had caused them to get lost in the first place, but they might not have been sure of their existence after only a sound.

After some time, I reached the point where I had stopped again.

"... hope they don't rearrange the books. Would fit their idea of an organization system. Hmmm, at least this tunnel seems to go up after a while. Whoa. Even the ceilings are bookshelves, here. They put glass doors on the shelves so that the books don't fall down, but I honestly can't see how you retrieve a book from there without all of the books falling down onto your head. This is some insane shit." Another burst of static.

"That's it. I'm back out again. There's a locked closet, a staircase, then a room with two shelves' worth of books. Don't see the big deal, honestly,—"

I hit the pause button. What the hell? They must have forced _sein_ to add this last part. This made it clear that they had gotten to _sein_.

"—but I swiped a few of them for the heck of it. Guess it's time to stop this recording now, and I'm glad that it didn't become necessary." A click, but the recording didn't end there. Rather, it began again with another burst of static.

"The lighting is weird down here. I passed a tunnel with pink lights—doesn't flatter my complexion—yet one of the books was still clearly green. I wonder how you get that kind of thing to work. Something like fluorescence, maybe. Absorb one frequency of light, emit another. Or was that phosphorescence? Anyway, who uses fluorescent dye on a book? I tell you, the deeper I go, the more these librarians seem like fucking cultists, and not only because of the monk-like robes they wear." Static.

The next part isn't clear at all, as though there had been bad reception throughout. I heard a few yells—I could make out 'halt'—but not much else was audible besides the audio to a chase and an ensuing scuffle. After a few moments, one of the parties had been subdued, and whoever remained conversed in low, hushed tones which, combined with the interference, lead to me not understanding anything. Something was being dragged over the ground very close to the microphone, and then, the sound was once again lost in static. I hit the pause button.

This snippet seemed to be the one where _sein_ was captured. I listened to it again, but I still couldn't understand anything. The next one started mid-sentence.

"—always had this kind of tendency, you know? Sorry, I know I'm rambling. But I've been in here for hours, now, and this is the fifth time I've walked through this tunnel, and I can't help that I'm getting bored. I know that there's a secret door somewhere in here. There has to be. After all, both the entrance and the exit of the tunnel are flanked by books which had been written in movies, not books, and the system REQUIRES there to be a secret door in that case. Maybe this one is the fifth door that other text had mentioned... Ah, there it is. As usual, entrances are heralded by soft-, not hardcovers, and the—"

I hadn't hit the pause button. The fragment had cut off again, and before I could collect my thoughts, the next one began.

"I can't honestly say that I've ever even opened that many books in my life. I mean, the only time society really forces you to read fiction is during school, and even then, I usually got away with a classmate's notes and some creative improvisation. I've been scouring books for hints for what feels like an hour now, based on nothing but a snatch of conversation I picked up by eavesdropping on the librarians. That's not really reasonable. Goddamn, am I ever glad that the battery in this phone lasts so long. I wish I had brought more water, though..."

I tried to concentrate on sorting the fragments. It seemed as though they had once been close enough to the cultists to eavesdrop on them, some time before this fragment happened. At some other point, the cultists had captured them and subsequently forced them to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had happened and switch off the phone. That earlier fragment about a system to navigate the library, however, seemed borderline crazy, and I couldn't help but be worried. Was this how _sein_ would end up, in the end?

"Okay. I found it. To be honest, I think I might be going mad. I never would have thought that would work, but it did. I hold it in my hand, just as I had described it: the index of the library unpublished. If my description was correct—alright, it worked. There are notes on the libraries' system of organization in here. Let me just look up the address again... 124 Nuwenhoff Street, alright. That's on page 153."

I almost jumped out of my seat. Nuwenhoff Street was just a few blocks off, and I'd never heard of any street of that name in any other city. But there had to be. I started up Google, the still-running audio file forgotten for a moment. Google didn't offer any other results than the one in my city, and I shivered. After the nearby public bookcase had been recommended as a drop-off point by the librarians, I shouldn't have been surprised, but this was hitting very close to home. Too close.

I focused on the audio again. The recording had grown silent, though it was still running. I waited for five minutes, drinking my cold tea, trying to sort through what I had already heard. The order of the various fragments was irrelevant, as was any logical structure I could impose on them. The question was what I should do next, after hearing _sein_ cry for help. _sein_ interrupted my thoughts.

"Apologies for the radio silence, patient listener." Their voice was different. Rougher. "I hope the past hour of silence has not persuaded you to give up on me. As I ration my water now, so do I ration my voice. Though, who knows? With the spotty connection down here, it might be that you're getting the abridged version anyhow. Abridged beyond the point of usefulness." _sein_ laughs, a painful sound which soon transitioned into a cough. Then, more quiet, they continued. "Oh god. I hope I don't die down here. Can you hear me? Can you hear these words? I've just looked at the battery and there's not much left. I'll have to ration it, too. But as soon as I turn this off, the emails will be sent automatically, if they will be sent at all. I'm at the mercy of the electronic systems I built. A metaphor for the state of humanity as a whole, I suppose. If you hear this, save me. I don't care how, just save me, please."

The recording ended. Were these _sein_'s last words? It did not seem as though they had been captured in those final moments. The email had been sent a mere hour ago. 124 Nuwenhoff Street was a few minutes away.

Would that I had known what was to happen next.

I stood up. _sein_ had left an elaborate electronic lifeline which was triggered only under specific conditions, but I had neither the time nor the skills necessary to construct something similar. What I did have was Cio. I knew that she wouldn't give up before she got me out of whatever mess I got into. She was going to be my common sense.

I wrote a quick email.

 

From: m1k@############.com

To: cio@########.com

subject: library

Hey Cio,

I understand now. _sein_ is the protagonist, but I am the cavalry.

Let's hope for a Big Damn Heroes moment, but I do hope you'll bail me out if I fail.

124 Nuwenhoff Street, alright?

 

Mike

 

Would that I had known what was to happen next.

WOULD THAT I HAD KNOWN


	10. Chapter 9

The library stretched before me. It surprised me with its mundanity. Considering the books it housed, even after _sein_'s description, some part of me had expected architecture as envisioned by Escher, or maybe Lovecraft. I had expected bookshelves as crooked and mighty as the roots of Yggdrasil, filled with books in unreadable runes. I had expected an eldritch glow in the air and keening wails in the air.

There wasn't anything like that. The library was barely larger than the staircase I had just traversed. The bookshelves stretched from floor to ceiling, which meant that their very tops were barely higher than my head. About ten meters in front of me, the bookshelves ended at a wall, though there seemed to be just enough space between the end of the shelf and the wall to pass through.

The warm, yellow glow of the lamps was reflected by thousands of motes of dust. All in all, the library seemed small, but comfortable, like any library in any small town. I considered the possibility that this was just some bibliophile's long-forgotten private stash, and that the entire mystery had been an elaborate hoax. I pulled a book off the shelf at random, and that reasonable explanation was shattered.

The book was bound in red leather and bore, in faint golden letters, the title The Anglo-American Cyclopaedia, Volume XLVI. I was not surprised to find that no other volumes of that encyclopedia stood in its neighbourhood. Even less surprising was the article that started on page 918 and offered information on the fictional land called Uqbar. With the atmosphere of the library, no other book could have been more fitting than the most mundane one Borges had invented: A commonplace encyclopedia, unremarkable save for the fact that it had four extra pages.

I looked around. The library had seemed small, before, but now I could see how enormous it really was. The shelves I had estimated to be ten meters long likely held hundreds of books, and every last one of those books didn't exist anywhere else. In terms of the effort that had gone into it, the library would have been gigantic even if the two shelves between which I stood had been the only ones, which I didn't believe for a second.

I walked along the shelves, reading the names on faded spines in passing. Many books had no printing at all on the spine, and in some cases, unreadable runes did cover the spines. Of those I could read, only a few names seemed familiar.

 

\- Morgenstern - The Princess Bride 

\- On Self-Delusion and Bounded Rationality

\- Trout - The Gospel from Outer Space

\- The Hive Queen and the Hegemon

\- The City of Dreaming Books

\- The Never-Ending Story

\- The Red Book of Westmarch

\- Foolish Wives

\- Trout - A Window in Time

\- The Book of the Dead

\- Cryptonomicon

\- The Sigsand Manuscript

\- The Messiah's Handbook

\- Adalbert Waffling - Magical Theory

\- The Book of Three

\- Holy Writ

 

I stopped reading. The shelves had no obvious method of organisation. I shouldn't forget why I really came here.

On reaching the end of the shelves, I looked to the right. My assumption had been correct; the shelves I had seen had not been the only ones. As a matter of fact, the library seemed to be quite a bit larger than my first impression had implied, and not very well-organized. I counted eleven long shelves from my vantage point, each standing at a different angle, which meant that some were perilously close, while others enclosed large open spaces. Throughout this mess, the ceiling stayed claustrophobically low. I could see that in the distance, the distance between the shelves became more even, suggesting corridors which sloped downwards, finally becoming more akin to the tunnels _sein_ had described.

I saw three options from this point onward. First, I could start wandering through the tunnels, trying not to get lost. The second option was to try and orient myself by reading books. _sein_ had mentioned finding a book which showed them the way, after all. The third option was what _sein_ had apparently done: writing about a potentially helpful book to make it appear in the library. I still wasn't sure what to think about that. It seemed like an extremely long shot requiring a lot of work, and probably wasn't worth it at the moment. While the library I was in was extremely improbable, I wasn't close to accepting it being _magic_.

 

When confronted with the unknown, gather knowledge. -> 91)

First, try to find your way. -> 13)

 

(Editor's note: Yes, this does seem to be a choose-your-own-path chapter. My condolences. If my html-fu were stronger, I might have been able to hack together a more comfortable interface; as this isn't the case, I recommend using ctrl+f to search for "n)", where n is the point you've decided to visit next. The points are designated with random two-digit numbers by the way, don't try to search for the "missing" ones.)

 

 

 

###### 13)

 

Finding useful books in this proverbial haystack seemed like a long shot. I walked through the tunnels, drawing a map on some paper. I'd never been to good at the precise, technical kind of drawing, so it wasn't perfect. I wished I could have just used the classic trick of a roll of twine, but that would just lead the cultists to my exact position. To keep myself from getting lost, I chose the leftmost option in every fork I encountered. Sooner or later, I would at least be at the beginning again, with a rough map of one circular stretch of tunnels, at which point I would hopefully have enough of a bearing to start exploring.

That was the plan, at least. Sadly, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. As I approached an intersection, I heard footsteps coming from the right. I pressed my back against a bookshelf and held my breath. A figure in a dark robe was walking across an intersection in the bookshelves, but the dim lights which prevented them from noticing me also made it impossible for me to see anything more specific than someone in a robe. The odds were high that this was one of the librarians, though.

When they had passed, I relaxed. I had walked through fifteen tunnels of various lengths so far, and it was quickly becoming clear that this library was large enough that I could spend weeks mapping it. The librarian was my best bet at finding anything relevant, especially if they really had captured _sein_.

I followed them. The library seemed to approve; as I progressed, the tunnels became shorter and more crooked, offering various corners to hide behind. In the few long and straight tunnels, there were narrow gaps between the bookshelves covering the walls into which I could retreat whenever it seemed as though my quarry would turn their head.

The deeper into the library we went, the more unsettling it became. A few of the things I saw had already been described by _sein_: bookshelves covering the ceiling or even the floor, strange lighting which seemed to come from nowhere, glowing books. Besides the strange interior design, the architecture of the tunnels changed.

While the floor of the tunnels had previously been mostly level, though sometimes with an incline, in the deeper tunnels, stairs became more frequent. In some cases, perfectly horizontal tunnels had stairs hewn into the floor at an angle, so that I had to balance on the edges of the steps, as though gravity itself had been rotated by forty-five degrees. Notably, the librarian I was following was also having problems keeping their previous pace, but unlike them, I had to cope with the path while staying completely silent. At some point, I came upon a vertical tunnel opening directly above my head, which the librarians had equipped with a makeshift wooden ladder which seemed to be a more recent addition compared to the rest of the library.

I tried to stay concentrated on tailing the librarian, but my mind could not keep from coming up with theories about the library. The many hypotheses we had disproven earlier seemed childishly insignificant in the face of the Escherian monstrosity I was traversing. Occam's Razor had confined us to the commonplace and reasonable, which this library was anything but. More outlandish theories seemed necessary to explain something like this: A conspiracy spanning centuries could have built it, especially if there had been a natural tunnel system beforehand. There might be an eccentric billionaire behind all of this, having some fun at the plebs' expense. As my eyes chanced upon a particularly luminescent set of runes on the back of a book, a more extreme theory came to mind. Magic. The runes were geometric, though, made up of intersecting half-circles and straight lines. Aliens, then.

I tore my eyes away only to find that the librarian I had been tailing had disappeared. I had been foiled by my inability to keep myself from trying to read anything and everything I saw. I couldn't say that it was unexpected.

There were a number of ways the librarian could have gone, and the twisting passages made it impossible to estimate the steps they might have taken. My lead was gone, and as I hadn't had the time to draw a map, I was lost.

 

When one gets lost, one should try to retrace their steps until arriving at a familiar place. 71)

Being lost is a binary state, which means further exploration in the hope of a discovery is worth it, as there is nothing more to lose. 80)

 

 

 

###### 18)

 

Slumped at the side of a bookshelf lay a person. They were asleep, but the peace that most people found in sleep had been denied to them. The tension in their face was uncoordinated. It did not resolve into an expression. Their arms were bound behind their back. I could describe their hairstyle, their clothing, maybe their gender. I won't.

This was _sein_. I knew it immediately, even before their eyes opened and widened at the sight of me. I spoke first. "Hey."

"You made it."

"You doubted me?" This conversation seemed familiar.

"Could you get me something to drink?"

 

Humans are innately evil. -> 53)

Humans are innately good. -> 96)

 

 

 

###### 20)

 

The back of my head hurt. My hands were tied together behind my back. With difficulty, I opened my eyes and saw only darkness.

"Hello."

I didn't recognize the voice, which could only mean one thing. "You're the librarians." I had almost said cultists.

"Yes. How glad I am that you recognize us." The voice sounded one hundred percent sincere, which made it only more sarcastic. "You see, it's a rare thing in this business that people know enough to appreciate our work."

"What do you want?"

"What I want?" The voice chuckles. "I want to explain to you what is really going on here."

"Don't. I don't want to know."

"Aww, what happened to your curiosity? We were so proud of you, and then you returned the books and forgot about us. That hurts, you know."

"What the fuck?" I should have restrained myself, but my head hurt like hell and I had a short tolerance for unreasonable people even when I was at my best. "I thought you were a secret cult. Shouldn't you dislike people learning about you?"

"We do want to stay secret. Yet, once the books had found their way to you, the matter was already decided. We did our best, of course, to cover everything up, but that was only meant to make you more curious. That's how it's supposed to be: no matter how grave the danger, the hero presses onward."

I smiled. This was more familiar ground. "I'm not the hero. Sein is."

The cultist laughed unpleasantly high-pitched. "Sein? Sein is a mere supporting character in this story."

"How do you know that?"

"Simple. The hero doesn't die before the story ends."

My smile was gone. For a moment, the topic of conversation had made me forget just how much danger I was in.

"Oh? You're so serious all of a sudden. Is this the moment where the hero finds his determination again?"

I barely heard the voice. _sein_ was dead? Had they only left them alive as a bait for me? I started to cry. A balled fist hit my head and returned me to reality.

"Don't cry. It's unbecoming of you. This is your great moment, you know? This is where you prove what you're made of. Do you know why we turned off the lights in this room and all adjacent ones, plunging it into deeper darkness than any you've ever seen?"

Another punch was necessary before I shook my head.

"It's because character is what you are in the dark."

I scoffed. "What the hell are you even talking about?" My voice was thin, but there. "What the fuck do you want from me?"

"You still don't understand?"

"Of course I don't! Get your heads out of your fucking books someday and look at the real world. It doesn't run on tropes."

"Hmm. It seems this one isn't a hero, either." A number of other voices broke out into murmur. Then, one rose above the din. "There's only one way to be sure!" The other voices followed. "One way! One choice!"

A hand grabbed my chin and forced my mouth open. "Drink this, and you will understand."

I fought, but it was clear that they were practiced at this, and sooner, rather than later, I succumbed. The mysterious fluid was thick like cream and burned its way down my throat, leaving behind only a disquieting numbness. The numbness spread quickly.

Once, I had read somewhere that the mucous membranes were the quickest way to get chemicals directly into the bloodstream, and therefore the brain. Whatever the cultists had fed me, it hit my brain with the velocity and momentum of a thrown brick, and all light faded from the world.

 

I woke in a part of the library I had never seen before. My mind felt strange. My backpack was somewhere else. I was lost, more than ever before. Something in my brain was raging.

 

In some cases, accepting death minimizes suffering. -> 36)

When the future is uncertain, hope survives, and life might still find a way. -> 82)

 

 

 

###### 22)

 

I chose to turn around, going over the books I had already seen again. It seemed like a good idea to take a closer look at one, so I chose a particularly harmless-looking one and cracked it open. To my surprise, the pages were empty. No title, no publisher information, no ink at all on what seemed like five hundred pages.

I put it back in its spot and chose another. Empty as well.

Pretty soon, I had determined that the actually written books were few and far between. Whoever was responsible for this was a mad bookbinder, not a mad author, then. It was still an enormous amount of work, but far more easily attributed to a small group of people.

In that case, the library certainly wasn't supernatural, which made it far less likely that I could get lost, and a bit more important to establish an upper bound on the library's size.

I turned around again, going back to the three-way intersection I had previously stopped at, and chose the left path. Within a dozen steps, it ended at a wall. While the bookshelves had been arranged to suggest that the corridor merely turned the corner, this was not so. I went back to the intersection and chose the right path this time, to a similar result.

I did a quick mental calculation. The corridor I had chosen had been one out of seven or eight, depending on how I counted them. It had found its end after thirty meters, with another twenty in its two branches. Combined with what I would call the entrance area, and considering that most corridors were flanked by bookshelves on both sides, it was still an enormous amount of books, but I wasn't dealing with the cavernous system of tunnels I had come to expect from _sein_'s email.

I must have been wrong. Maybe this corridor was an outlier, and all others were significantly longer. I went back to check another corridor, trying to be more stealthy, and found similar results. It would be easy to run into one of the librarians by accident, but it would also be easier than expected to find _sein_. Given the way the content of their email seemed to contrast with the reality of the library, I wasn't sure whether I did want to find them.

I went into yet another corridor. This one did go deeper, yet, after two intersections, it ended as well. However, there was no bare brick wall before me, but an unassuming door.

I put my fingers on the handle, overcome with doubt. If this was some sort of headquarters, I did not want to charge in. I put an ear to the door and listened, but couldn't hear any sounds worth mentioning.

I opened the door and peeked. I was looking at a large, open room which was sparsely furnished and reminded me of a deserted office building. There was no human being in there.

In the midst of the room was a desk on which stood an ancient tube-based computer monitor. Its off-white colour made it seem as though it had come directly out of the twentieth century. An anachronism. I went into the room, closing the door behind me.

In the top-left corner of the black screen, a short, green message was written, followed by a blinking cursor. I moved closer to read it.

Ask, and ye shall receive

There was no keyboard, not even a mouse. If I asked, it would have to be out loud.

 

Most breakthroughs are preceded by someone asking the obvious questions. -> 39)

When someone you don't trust tells you to do something, never just do it. -> 29)

 

 

 

###### 29)

 

I tried to think. The message on the console didn't seem like a generic standby message. If it was tailored for me specifically, they already knew I was here. If it was a more general trap, however, they might have hidden a microphone here and were waiting for me to say something. In any case, it didn't help at all to respond to their bait.

I took another quick look around the room. There were a number of file cabinets, which contained old-fashioned library cards. While some of them had been used, the titles of the books didn't tell me anything. More interesting was a box of office supplies, in which I found the stamp which had been used to mark the books I had received.

When I turned back toward the console, another line had appeared.

We know you're here. You might as well ask.

 

While persistence is a virtue, obstinacy is not a good first impression. 39)

Regardless of the content, sometimes, the sending of a message is information enough. 77)

 

 

 

###### 30)

 

The cultists wanted something, but ___ had never shown any interest in me. Only _sein_ had. If I assumed they were colluding, everything made sense.

"You want me to review books for you, don't you? No need to keep up the _sein_ persona. I'll do it." I tried to put some conviction into my words. "I think what you're doing here is pretty great. Procedurally generating books is something for which I think there'd be a lot of demand. I have to ask, though. Why all the secrecy? I mean, you could just open this as an actual library, and I think people would be very interested, especially once you start coming up with original works."

You don't understand yet. Don't worry, that is usual in new recruits.

"New recruit? So you don't want to keep me as a contractor?"

You know too much. There's no way around joining us, but don't worry. It's a fulfilling job.

Stan will be around to pick you up in a second, just sit tight.

I was having some misgivings about that. "Is there any way to opt out at this point?"

Ha Ha Ha

No

Someone knocked on the door, and a big robed guy who I supposed was Stan entered.

"Hey, fresh meat. You look like a bookworm. You'll love it with us."

"Maybe?"

"Ha, don't worry." Stan extended a hand. "I'm Stan, and you are?"

"Mike." I let my hand get caught in Stan's murderously firm grip.

"Sorry about this, though."

"Sorry about wh—" I got interrupted as Stan pulled on my hand, simultaneously tripping me and hitting me on the back of the head with something he had held in the other hand.

 

I woke up on a comfortable armchair. Around me was a tiny room without much in the sense of furniture. Besides the chair and a lamp, there was only a small nightstand with a single book placed on it.

I stood up. As expected, the door was locked. I could see where this was going. Sooner or later, boredom would drive me to read the book, and this was to be my initiation ritual.

I chuckled. As far as initiations went, that was very agreeable. I probably would have asked the cultists for book recommendations at some point anyhow, so I might as well get it over with right now.

The book was no ancient, ponderous tome, but rather a worn paperback with an unassuming yellow cover. Judging by its size, it was no more than two hundred pages long. Its title read simply: The Library Unpublished.

I cracked it open and began to read.

 

Two hours later, I was convinced that the Library was the single most important thing in existence. Working together with the cultists was the purpose I had longed for my entire life, though I hadn't been aware of it.

  

  

###### 36)

 

Dear Cio.

Sadly, I did not bring a sheet of fine parchment into this library, because I never imagined I would have to write something like this letter. My quadrille paper is all gone as well. I ripped a page out of a book, instead. I chose an old one, in which the ink was already mostly faded. I don't doubt _sein_'s word that there is a book with empty pages, somewhere in this library, but I think that opening too many books can be dangerous in this eldritch place. I don't know how, precisely, I got here, but from all I can tell, the library is real. I can feel many things staring when I turn my back. The books? Maybe. All my attempts at finding the way out have been stymied by them, or the malevolent architecture of this place. I don't know.

You're clever, and you've never been satisfied by questions without answers. That is why I have no doubts that this letter will find your hands, somehow, even though my own escape out of the depths of this labyrinth seems inconceivable. You've always been worried I'd get lost in books, someday, and never get back again. I did.

Parts of me are missing already. Other parts will be gone, soon. I'm talking about my crumbling mind, not my body. I can still understand language, and I still have enough of my memory to remember you, but it's being eroded. Eaten away.

I can't trust my perception anymore. The bookshelves dissolve into shadows when I stop concentrating. I can't even be sure that I'm still writing.

I'm sorry. You told me to be careful, and I screwed it all up. I wanted to find _sein_ again. I can't remember whether I succeeded, or how I got to this specific bookshelf. I can't even remember why I can't remember, though I would bet that it's because I read a book I shouldn't have read.

Apparently, this is the ending I deserve. But I know you want closure. I therefore bestow upon you my last words. Not a testament. Just these last thoughts that are going through my ailing feeble mind. They're disconnected and rambling, but they're all I have left to offer.

I liked books. I loved them. Let that be my epitaph.

Mike

 

 

 

###### 39)

 

"What the fuck is going on here?"

My shaky voice echoed through the room, and for a moment, I felt slightly silly, but then, the blinking cursor began to move, character after character appearing in smooth succession.

A good question. Allow us to explore it thoroughly.

Consider a single moment in time. A single state the fictional world of a story is in. Every character, every part of the background. Split it into individual concepts.

The cursor blinked, as though it was waiting for me to say something.

"Tropes."

No. While some tropes fit the bill, many others have an element of time, of sequence. For now, we are cataloguing the present. And when we are done, we can repeat the same for another state of the same world, or another world entirely. As we proceed, we gather elements of stories. Consider all of them in their entirety. While we would probably have an infinite amount of these elements if we gathered data for an infinite time, there is a finite amount of fiction. Consider, then, all of their possible combinations, which are, again, world-states. The set of all possible states of all fictional worlds.

"A set?" I knew this to be a basic concept in mathematics, but the underpinnings of theory had never held my attention.

Yes. As some concepts transition seamlessly into others, this set forms a continuum. It is infinitely subdividable, there is no atomic composition. However, there is a structure we can impose. Let us introduce the concept of a story. A story is a curve in this continuum, an ideal line which connects an infinite amount of worldstates. What does it mean for two points to be connectable? It means that a story can move from one point to the other without becoming incoherent.

"Wait. That curve doesn't have a defined direction. Stories don't make sense if they're told backwards."

But they do. We aren't talking about reversing the words in a sentence, or merely rearranging paragraphs. We are talking about inverting the way we travel through concepts. Death becomes birth. Learning becomes forgetting. Redemption becomes a start of darkness.

Now, we introduce the concept of distance. Distance is merely a function which maps any two points to a number. It has to obey some more specific rules, but those don't matter right now. What does matter is that once a metric of distance is chosen, a topology is imposed unto our continuum.

"What the hell is a topology?"

Distance informs the path a story may take. A coherent story can only move from one infinitely close point to the next, for anything else would mean a discontinuity, a plot hole, if you will. An infinite sum over infinitesimally distant points results in a continuous line. Instead of focusing on only one line, we can observe all paths from a given point. All possible story threads, considered together, weave a cocoon, if you will. We can call it culture, for what is culture but all stories that could be told? This is a topology. The shape of our continuum.

"And now?"

Now, we have a mathematical definition of what continuity means to a story. Considering our story a curve parametrized by time, we can define functionals, higher order functions which take the curve in its entirety as a parameter. With the help of differential geometry, these functionals can help us quantify Character Development, or Deconstructiveness, or how severe the twists in a story are. We can quantify whether a story holds meaning. Whether it has a moral. Whether it has heart.

Functionals are definable even as our story is still fluid and undefined, though of course we do not know their exact value at that moment. By demanding a functional to take on a certain value, we impose a boundary condition on our unformed story. We shape it in the womb.

"How can that-"

The rest is numerics. We crunch numbers until a curve is found that satisfies the boundary conditions, however approximately. With enough computing power, the curve conforms closely enough that the human reader will never notice its slight imperfections. This skeleton perfectly agrees to whatever specifications one might wish for.

"It's not a story yet. Just an idea for one."

Yes. The next step is to parse the story concepts at any given point of the curve into something that corresponds to the highest level of abstraction a neural network may offer. The instantiation of that abstraction is what neural networks were created for. Ceaselessly, it matches patterns and fills holes until text emerges where previously, there had been none. The rules of what those patterns look like are determined organically by analyzing training data. In this way, a neural network doesn't only follow rules of grammar and punctuation; it imitates style.

"A story from nothing. No author needed."

No author but the data accumulated by others. Cultural influence distilled into a tool. Just like any other author, this machine stands on the shoulders of giants.

"You can impose arbitrarily hard restrictions. Let the curve makes as many tight turns as it needs to, no matter whether an author. Three thousand words written as easily as one. For that matter, why not an entire library?"

You begin to understand. Yet, there is something missing, still.

"Data."

Yes. Our system had to be tested.

"Which means that you needed people to break books apart into concepts and plotlines."

Some databases do the same thing and were helpful in the early stages of the project. At some point, however, detailed adjustment was necessary. We needed volunteers.

"Volunteers which were willing to read mountains of books and summarize them. Volunteers which could describe specific situations down to the smallest detail if queried. In other words, volunteers which would have been expensive if adequately compensated, and the money just wasn't there."

Yes.

"Even if those volunteers could be found, there was the problem of trolls. Far easier to trick people. If sufficiently terse, a single employee could keep more than a dozen people 'entertained' over an instant messaging program."

You do understand, then.

"And why the fuck did you invite me here? Just to gloat at me?"

We didn't.

"What?"

We didn't. But given your statement, we can guess who did.

"Sein was acting on their own."

It does seem as though they grew unduly attached. We had to interfere multiple times to keep you from meeting each other, but failed.

"What happens next? Do you make good on your death threats?"

Well.

We would say that this depends on what you will say next.

Convince us.

 

Purpose does not falter. -> 72)

Doubt can never be extinguished. -> 99)

Careful consideration is the highest of all virtues. -> 86)

 

 

 

###### 49)

 

"You're just buying time, aren't you?"

As if on cue, the door burst open and a trio of robed cultists armed with batons ran into the room. Each of them was quite a bit larger and heavier than me. As the archetypal scrawny nerd, I raised my hands in surrender.

"I yield. No need to get rough."

The leading cultist smiled in the shadows of his cowl. "Sorry, bub. You don't want to be awake for this. I'll make it quick."

He walked up to me at an almost leisurely pace and gave me a quick, professional whack on the head. I see stars, first, then nothing.

I never woke up again.

 

 

 

###### 53)

 

I realized that this was the first time I had held any kind of power over _sein_. It would have been stupid not to use it.

"If you could answer some of my questions, first."

_sein_ sighed. "What do you want to know?"

"Where are the people who bound you? The librarians?"

"Don't worry. They won't be back until after you've rescued me."

"How do you even know that?"

"I heard them talk. Just unbind me."

I sighed. "I'm sorry, Sein, but this still doesn't make any sense to me. Who are you? How did you get here? Why did you know so much about me? Did you ever hack my phone?"

_sein_ opened their mouth and closed it again.

"And then, there's the most important question. If this is the library, where are the librarians? Did they ever even exist, or did you just make them up?"

"You don't trust me. Fine. What's next?"

"Next, I need to find proof. We wait until the librarians turn up."

"What?"

"You heard me."

"Don't you want to, I don't know, hide us first or something?"

"That's what you'd expect me to do, isn't it?"

"Fuck. I remember how I thought that only a crazy person would come to rescue me. I wish I hadn't been right."

I smiled. "There's a way out of this, for you."

"Do tell."

"You give me answers that I can believe, and as soon as you do, we'll be on our way out of here."

"So you know how to get out of here."

"Lying is the way you work, Sein. I won't dirty my lips. But we can be on our way even if we don't know the destination, and you do seem as though you'd want that. Convince me."

_sein_'s eyes widened. They understood their situation, then. I grinned and opened my mouth to say something else, but the back of my head exploded in sudden pain. The sensation of hitting the ground never even registered.

 

Consciousness is a prerequisite for agency. -> 20)

 

 

 

###### 54)

I struck a match. What a curious thing, that flame: ethereal, yet somehow more real than the shadows and dust around me. What the electrical light could not illuminate, the tiny flicker of light made clear. The library was not real. As the shadows danced around the bookshelf, painting red leather black and casting embossed gold letters in sharp relief, I realized, for the first time, what the library _lacked_. Some quality I lacked the words for, a metaphysical spine, was missing, and as a result, the library suddenly felt flat and lifeless.

I touched flame to book, and the fire flared; within seconds, I had to let go not to get burned. That was a last refuge in hypocrisy, a last attempt not to face the inescapable truth that soon enough, I _would_ burn. I had not managed to escape the labyrinth cloaked in darkness; I would not escape it with tongues of flame licking at my heels.

I took one final, deep breath, tried to ignore the smoke scratching at my lungs, and ran.

 

 

 

###### 57)

 

I wasn't going to be satisfied with just succeeding. I would succeed _optimally_.

I leafed through the index. Though it was a mighty tome of more than a thousand closely-printed pages, it quickly became obvious that it was very incomplete. Nonetheless, it was very well-organized and even contained a glossary of genres. Between Science Fiction and Supernatural Romance I found Self-Help Guides. From there, it was easy enough to find a fictional book I knew to exist: Living in a Fictional Universe for Dummies.

I couldn't help but smile as I wandered through the shelves, using the map in the book as a guide. Even in this strange place, Cio could be counted on to bail me out. In a strange twist of fate, it was not her common sense which would save me, but her penchant for unnecessarily convoluted storytelling. With Cio, even the most absurd crossover fanfiction had to be metafictional.

Among ancient, dusty tomes, the trademark yellow cover of the "For Dummies" series stood out like a beacon. I opened the book, taking care not to crease the spine. Even the cheapest paperback had to be treated with the reverence a book demanded. Also, this book was impressively thick, especially for a self-help book.

Before long, I had found the section I had searched for.

####  The Complete Idiot's Guide To Munchkinning

So you think you can cheat your way to omnipotence? This section gets you up to speed, even if you can't tell a Munchkin from a Muffin.

(A helpful sidebar explained that a Munchkin was a term from Dungeons and Dragons describing a player who would try to win even at the expense of the fictional world's plausibility.)

First, though, a warning: This is very much an advanced topic. Attempting this without being sure of your author's intentions might lead to total instant cessation of your existence, and you wouldn't want that, would you? Even if your author decides to accommodate your illusions of grandeur, this will certainly derail the plot. STOP READING THIS if you like where your life is going.

I cast a vaguely guilty glance at the ceiling before I realized that searching for an author up there was nothing more than a vestige of my religious upbringing. God being in the sky was implausible enough, but the author truly didn't belong there.

Still here? You must be truly desperate, but that's how fictional lives work out sometimes. Never fear! If you have the freedom to read this book, you can get out of whatever mess you are in.

First off, pick any superpowers you have access to from this list:

A long list of superpowers and assorted page numbers followed. Some were extremely specific, but my situation fit only the most general one: Reality Warping. I was directed to another page full of choices, and another one, until I had managed to narrow it down to "can bring books into existence by writing about them".

Though it might not seem like much, you've been blessed with a power any author would love to have! Even I am jealous right now.

The first thing to check is how your ability is limited. Some common limitations and ways to get around them are:

In that rather long list, a particularly helpful entry was:

If the books appear in random places around the world, try to create many copies of the same book and make them very, very visible.

Thus informed, I went on toward the next paragraph.

The second step is checking what capabilities your powers have. Try whether you're capable of the following, but remember to stay cautious:

\- Creating books which contain information you do not know

\- Creating books in other languages

\- Creating impossible books (an autobiography by an illiterate, or the classic three-author-paradox in which the author of one book is a character in the next, forming a loop)

\- Creating books about the future (warning: might result in the loss of any remaining agency, as a pre-determined universe might preclude free will)

\- Creating books which can talk and have a personality (as always, be wary of creating life, as it's a large responsibility)

\- Creating books made out of any material, like non-perishable food, sealed bags of water, or even your local phlebotinum

\- Creating books which are also weapons (sharp or heavy books serve well in a scuffle, but don't stop there! Your power might also consider a rocket launcher with a few pages attached a book. For more information on plausible and implausible weaponry, consult page 412.)

\- Creating books with magical powers, such as making light, levitating, having self-replenishing pages or even hypnosis or other mind control powers. Be particularly careful with the last one! Though it is an easy path to exponentially increasing intelligence, it might also leave you a gibbering madman!}

My head spun. It seems it had been the right idea to look for a book to help me decide what to do, as the possibilities were larger than imagined. I couldn't have come up with the idea of a book that was a rocket launcher in a million years. Thankfully enough, there was another section with a step-by-step guide. My "superpower" was already proving very convenient.

After a few minutes of writing and a few hours of searching, as my books did not turn up in the Index, I had established some ground rules. The Library had a very specific notion of what counted as a book. Books made of non-typical materials were out, as were sentient books, magic books and (sadly) rocket launcher books. However, books with information that was unknown to me were possible, as were books with subtle but mundane effects. For example, implementing something like the King in Yellow wouldn't have been possible by stating it to be magic, but stating it to be a particularly maddening and insidious piece of poetry was possible. After all, even something as innocuous as Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther had driven people to suicide.

Of course, I didn't implement The King in Yellow, as stark raving madness did not appeal to me as a state of mind. Rather, I used a hypothetical book to teach myself speed reading and a few other highly useful, but not impossible mental abilities. After that, I got a few partial maps of the library. As it turned out, it wasn't possible to define a complete atlas of it, which had interesting implications.

Rather soon, my backpack was filled to the brim with books, but a very interesting book about origami allowed me to fashion a cart for more books out of some books which didn't interest me anymore. Though all of the really interesting books were written in a code I had learned to read fluently from another book, it didn't seem safe to leave them on the floor. As the Guide To Munchkinning would have put it, leaving the source of all your power lying around where everyone else could find it was stupid.

It was at this point that my improved mental abilities really kicked in, because I now noticed the obvious flaw in that thought. The source of my current power had always been lying around in the open, by which I meant to say that whoever had access to the library and the slightest desire to optimize would sooner or later end up as I did. It was a modified version of the Fermi Paradox: given that other people visited the library, allowing a non-zero percentage of them to become arbitrarily knowledgeable, where were they? They either lacked the inclination or the ability to contact me, but certainly not the knowledge of where I was. Tracking other extremely powerful people seemed like a good use of power.

That was, of course, my immediate next step. It turned out that all of those I could consider my peers were to be found deeper in the library. Given that individual motivations tended to vary even among clever people, there had to be another explanation for the fact that none of them were outside the library. It seemed most likely that for whatever reason, people lost whatever they gained inside the library as they left it. At the same time, deeper inside the library, the possibilities might be even more endless.

Going back to my normal life was less and less appealing to me, and the depths of the library beckoned.

I rescued _sein_ first, of course. After I gave them my remaining water, they were physically fine. Psychologically, they were distraught, but easily able to find their way out of the library with the map I supplied. They could not understand my new motivations, but in the grand scheme of things, their attachment to me was irrelevant. Ignoring their protests, I went on my way.

Into the library.

And beyond infinity.

 

 

 

###### 71)

 

It was time to get out of here. On the first three intersections, everything went well. I still remembered which path the cultist had taken, having been intently focused on them. After that, however, I was stuck at a five-way intersection without any guess at where to go.

I pulled my improvised map out of my backpack. A single sheet of quadrille paper with a few shaky pencil lines would hardly qualify as a map in any case, but this one was especially unhelpful given that my map depicted six intersections, but I had passed at least thirty while tailing the cultist.

I sat down on the floor. The tunnels were clearly distinguishable from each other through their geometry, their lighting and subtle differences between the bookcases. I knew I had gone up a steep staircase at some point, but was it the one I saw here? I felt as though the steps were shaped somewhat differently than what I remembered, but I couldn't be sure.

When _sein_ had gotten lost, they had written a short text describing a guide to the library, and soon enough, they had found exactly that book in the library itself, using it to find their way back out.

I got out my pencil and a fresh sheet of quadrille paper. Chewing on the end of the pencil, I thought about what to write.

This wasn't the first time I had been forced to face my inability to put words on paper. As any bookworm alive, I tried to write a book once, back in the throes of adolescence, when I still entertained the delusion that I was smart. As it turned out, I didn't have as much to say as I had thought, and the "book" found its end on page 3 with the violent deaths of all characters that I had managed to create. Yes, both of them.

The task I was facing now was even more difficult. I was basically assuming that the library would create any book I described, but it might well be that _sein_ had fulfilled some arcane criteria by sheer luck. Maybe what I wrote needed to resemble a story. That would fit all previous cases of defictionalization we had witnessed. I hoped it wouldn't have to be a good one.

Once upon a time, there was a book.

No, scratch that. I was going to at least _try_ to do this right.

On 124 Nuwenhoff street, hidden in an abandoned building, there is a library. I call it a library because it is a large building that contains books; however, it is unlike any other library you might find in the United States, or really any country at all. The library is situated below ground, and its many books are stored in winding tunnels lined by bookcases. It's a vast and sprawling library, so strange in its architecture that it seems not to have been built by human hands at all.

The most unique thing about this library are the books. It contains massive amounts of fictional books, books which are mentioned in other books, movies or other works of fiction. They come from all kinds of genres, with all kinds of covers and bindings, but they have one thing in common: none of the books in the library can be found anywhere else on Earth.

The variety of books is so overwhelming that the library's caretakers could not possibly organize them. To aid their attempts to orient themselves in the library, the librarians wrote many indices over the years, all of them unfinished. As there must be a way to note a given book's location, all of those indices contain at least a partial map of the library. Some of them found their ways into the bookcases of the library itself, distributed by helpful librarians to offer guideposts to visitors who got lost. To make them recognizable, they bear the mark of the library on their spine.

I carefully drew the symbol under the text. If it really was possible to force texts to appear inside the library this way, I was basically saved, now. By inventing many different books, distributing them evenly and marking all of them with the same symbol, I had greatly increased my chances at finding one. I wasn't sure whether it was a good idea to mention the library in my text, but _sein_ must have done the same. In any case, it was too late for second thoughts. At this point, it had either worked, which meant I would be finding a book soon, or it hadn't, which meant I could try again with a slightly different text.

I wandered through the corridors, restarting my feeble attempts at mapping. After a few minutes, I had another idea. What if a book had to be published to have an effect on the library? It was possible that _sein_ had used their internet connection to put whatever they wrote online to satisfy that requirement. Of course, I could do the same thing. I snapped a picture of my text with my phone and put it into my dropbox, making it public. Even though no one except me had the link to it, it was theoretically accessible, and as soon as my phone got an internet connection again, the picture would be uploaded.

I had no idea whether that last trick had been necessary, but within five minutes, I found one of the indices. It was a slim red book, marked with the stamp of the library unpublished, and on its cover it bore the title:

An Attempt At Mapping And Indexing The Library Unpublished

By Bartholomew Higgins the Elder

I cracked it open and breathed in deeply. Down here, the books were only rarely exposed to strong smells, which gave the aroma of a fresh binding the necessary time to mature into something more subtle and deep. There would have been something intoxicating about it even if it hadn't been the lifeline I had longed for.

The first thirty pages served as an atlas composed of crudely-drawn maps hardly better than my own. It would take some time to find my place in there based only on the shapes of the tunnels, but time was all I had.

Within half an hour, I had matched my own drawings to those of the atlas and started the long walk toward the exit. Whenever a new intersection came up, I compared it to the atlas. Every time, the map fit, and every time, my smile got a little wider. Once I got out of the library, I could restock on food and drinks and start another attempt to find _sein_. Maybe the map would even be enough to convince Cio that the library really existed, and that the recording wasn't just an elaborate trick by _sein_.

After half an hour, the library around me started to become stranger. Gone were the familiar titles on books. Less than one book out of a hundred was labeled using an alphabet I recognized. The proportions of the tunnels gradually became more exaggerated. The ceilings were higher than before, yet the bookcases were closer together. I barely managed to squeeze through some of the more thin bottlenecks, even though I was not a particularly large person.

Yet the atlas still matched up with what I was seeing, and retracing half an hour of steps would have been a waste. I would get through this weirder part of the library, and once I did, the exit wouldn't be far.

My eyelids started to get heavy. I tried to blink the sleep away, but it felt as though the exhaustion was deep within my bones.

I hurried onward. I knew that the exit couldn't be that far away, and even though I was starting to get a monstrous headache, I could still read the atlas, and it still matched up with the layout of the library. Narrow, long tunnels, star-shaped intersections where up to eight corridors met.

The room began to spin around me. I barely managed to keep myself from falling and leaned against a shelf for support.

The shelves were made of some sort of glass, reflecting the light of the books in an otherworldly manner. Come to think of it, how had I not noticed that light before? It was beautiful.

Without warning, I vomited. I finally realized that there was something wrong with my body, but now it was too late. I was too dizzy to stand up. There was no way I would make it all the way back to safety.

Maybe I would feel better after sleeping for a while. There was no choice: I was unable to resist the weight of my eyelids in any case.

Those were my last thoughts before losing consciousness. The narrow corridor in which I was lying was to be my grave.

 

 

 

###### 72)

 

"Where is Sein now?"

You don't get it. _sein_ never existed. They were a persona created for the sole purpose of extracting knowledge from you. Whoever was behind that screen didn't care for you in the least. Even their handle hinted at it. "Sein", German for both "to be" and "his". From the start, the persona called _sein_ existed only for your sake, and now that you no longer serve a purpose, they no longer exist, either.

"I don't believe that. Sein sent me those audio files long after I had broken all contact with them. They're in here somewhere, and you're trying to pull the wool over my eyes."

What do you think, then?

"You called the leaked books an internal mishap. I think that whoever was behind the identity of Sein got fed up with your shit and decided to raise some havoc. So they leaked the books and kept in contact with me despite your explicit instructions."

What does that tell you about _sein_'s broadcast from the library?

"It was a fake. But it wasn't a fake made with the intention to harm me. I'm starting to understand."

Understand what?

"I'm here for a reason."

The cry of misguided martyrs throughout history.

No. Whoever was behind those messages was failing badly at manipulating me.

"You're getting desperate because I'm starting to realize that I do have an ace up my sleeve."

Ridiculous. You'll never get out of the Library alive.

"So why haven't you already sent some of your cultists to catch me? I think you can't."

The screen didn't answer, which was confirmation enough for me.

"Let's assume that your "internal mishaps" have become harder and harder to contain. Yours wouldn't be the first cult to self-destruct. As a result, none of your followers in the Library actually has both the time and the means to overpower me. That's why you are sitting at some keyboard, stalling me."

You overestimate your importance.

"I recommend not always saying the exact opposite of what you really think. You want me to be here, not somewhere else."

Ha.

"Which means I'll be going. It was nice talking to you, but there is an urgent matter I have to attend to."

Which would be?

"Rescuing Sein."

I left the room.

 

I found _sein_ slumped against a bookcase, their hands tied behind their back. I couldn't tell you how I knew that it was them; there was a moment when they looked up, our eyes met, and all the subtle emotional cues our facial muscles could muster aligned into a Shibboleth. No other pair of people would have reacted exactly the way we did, and for each of us, it was obvious from the start who the other was.

"You came."

I smiled. "I did. I can take you out of here."

_sein_ shivered. "Outside."

"Yes. It's been a while for you, hasn't it?" It was obvious in the paleness of their skin, in the dilation of their pupils, in the way their eyes shifted when I used the word.

Yet, they smiled. It was an uneasy, shaky smile, but it was there. "Yes. And to think that used to call you a nerd. Now look at you, pulling off your best Indiana Jones impression."

I looked down at the nerdy t-shirt which was on uneasy terms with my scrawny physique and raised an eyebrow.

"Oh, shush. It's not the outside that counts, Mike. You're an intrepid adventurer in your heart."

I laughed. "That's just about the most corny thing I've ever heard, and I've read a lot of bad fantasy."

I cut _sein_'s bonds, then helped them up. "So, have I rescued you at this point? It's not like you need to be carried."

_sein_ laughed. "Yeah, but if I had just wanted to go outside, it would have been easy to do it years ago. No, I'm still here for a reason."

"A reason." I feared what would come next.

"I'm not going outside right now. I've been fighting the good fight for a long, long time now, and I'm not going to give up."

"Even though they already captured you once?"

"Even though they tried to kill me, and would probably have succeeded had some of my allies not distracted them at the right moment. You have to understand, Mike. I'm fighting for this library, and I won't give up that easily."

I sighed. "What am I, then? Some guy whose only purpose is cutting you free?"

_sein_ smiled shyly. "I hoped you'd be the cavalry. I called for aid."

"And I'll just have to do my best impression of the Riders of Rohan, huh?" I sighed again, though this time, the exasperation was more playful. "Asking for help with a popcultural reference. You just know how to push my buttons. So will this climactic battle be fought bare-handed, or do we pick up some swords on the way?"

"Better. We're going to pick up some books."

"Books."

"We're in a library, after all."

"And how are books going to help us?"

"You'll come to understand. Follow me."

And I did.

 

 

 

###### 77)

 

They knew I was here, which meant that there was only one route left. I turned around and ran toward the door, slamming it open and hitting something soft in the process.

"Aw, fuck."

Instinctively, I turned toward the voice, though the speaker was still hidden by the door itself, and received a blow on the back of my head for my trouble. I was out before I hit the ground.

 

Consciousness is a prerequisite for agency. -> 20)

 

 

 

###### 80)

 

In for a penny, in for a pound. I looked again at the book that had drawn my attention and realized that it really was different than the books around it. Books that glowed were rare, even in these eldritch depths, but this one was more than just a bit more luminous. It positively illuminated the other books around it, and the closer I looked, the more I realized that the light seemed more electrical than eldritch.

I tried to pull the book out of the case, but it resisted. After some tugging, it tilted a few centimeters forward, then it was stuck again.

I couldn't resist whispering a quip. "So I can't even borrow a book? What kind of library is this?"

As though in answer, a low rumbling spread through the bookcase. Like a secret door in a young adult mystery, the bookcase slid half a meter to the side, revealing a hidden door.

Well. I certainly hadn't expected that, but as a rule, genres that accommodated elaborate secret doors tended to reward intrepid explorers. I opened it and neon lights flickered to life. I was standing in a large, open room which was sparsely furnished and might have passed for a desolate office in something surreal and kafkaesque.

In the midst of the room was a desk on which stood an ancient tube-based computer monitor. Its off-white colour made it seem as though it had come directly out of the twentieth century. An anachronism.

In the top-left corner of the black screen, a short, green message was written, followed by a blinking cursor. I moved closer to read it.

Ask, and ye shall receive

There was no keyboard, not even a mouse. There was only one way to buy into this lunacy, if I chose to do so.

 

Most breakthroughs are initiated by someone asking the obvious questions. -> 39)

When someone you don't trust tells you to do something, never just do it. -> 29)

 

 

 

###### 82)

 

I descended further. Down here, the lamps shone only intermittently, their glow somehow guided by my awareness of them. As I realized that they existed, their light dimmed, as though the very concept of illumination, of understanding, was to be denied to me. When the lamps denied me their light, the books themselves showed me the path. In thanks, I offered them my regards, opening them with the reverent yet quotidian air of a monk engaged in prayer. I had done it so many times before, yet I had never stopped to consider just what it meant to open a book. I was reminded of a quote by Oscar Wilde, about influence being evil in and of itself, for influencing someone means giving away a piece of your own soul. In those catacombs, I realized that books fulfilled that definition. And as I knelt down on the floor, my eyes wandering over pages of runes I couldn't read, I was aware of what I was taking and what I was giving in return.

I rose from my position of supplication. It was below me, now, to worry about such things as my location or my goals. I had seen the intricacies of the library, I had read of its books, and with every page I considered, with every letter I mentally ingested, my own goals had changed to suit those books I had read.

There was a difficulty, an intricacy at the heart of the matter, which I had not yet considered. The library's true nature—_sein_'s whereabouts—the cultists' intentions—all those were trivialities now, not worth of notice. Rather, another question had revealed itself to me, namely the question of Cio. By hypothesizing that _sein_ was the hero of our tale, she had raised the question of the true nature of the universe.

How could I not have seen it before? There was a purpose to life, one that I was now dedicating myself to. I read.

From somewhere distant, the librarians' chants reached my ears. Soon, I would join them.

 

 

 

###### 86)

 

"Give me a minute to think about it."

There was probably something I could say to convince the cultists to let me and _sein_ go, but ideas did not come easily. For one, the only thing they had told me about were their methods, not their motivations. What did they hope to accomplish with their absurd scheme?

For a start, I assumed everything that ___ had said to me could be taken at face value. That meant the books were leaked against the cultists' will, and that they tried to stay secret in general. Yet, while they threatened me with death, they didn't actually go as far as killing me. Even stranger were their current actions; somehow, they had decided to answer my questions for whatever reason, and while the explanation they had given me wasn't complete, it wasn't completely implausible either. They weren't killing me, and they weren't force-feeding me Rohypnol, though it was obvious that they were now in a position to do that.

Yet how did they profit from me being informed?

 

To avoid being conned, doubt the premise. -> 49)

If all conclusions fail to make sense, there is something wrong with an unspoken assumption. -> 30)

 

 

 

###### 91)

 

Reading seemed to be the thing to do in a library. The only question left was where I should start.

I wandered through the corridors. Any book labelled in unreadable runes or bound in leather of questionable origin was obviously out. Any book I recognized was also not worth reading, given that most fictional books wouldn't help here. Rather, I was looking for something like a guide to fictional libraries or, alternatively, a great big book of everything.

Very soon, I reached the three-way intersection that marked the end of the corridor. There wasn't a lot of nonfiction in this library, and what little there was didn't seem very helpful.

I wondered whether I should go deeper or comb through the part of the library close to the entrance.

 

People who do their utmost to stay out of trouble never accomplish anything. -> 97)

Safety is a prerequisite for success. -> 22)

 

 

 

###### 96)

 

"Sure." I pulled a bottle of water from my backpack and held it to their lips. They drank greedily.

"Thanks. You're a lifesaver."

I looked around. "Not to hurry you, but I really want to get around to the actual lifesaving."

_sein_ offered me their wrists, which had been bound with some kind of cloth tape. I cut it off. "Nice that they didn't use handcuffs."

"Yeah. When all you have are bookbinding supplies, everything starts to look like a book."

I laughed. "This is where we are, then. Any ideas on getting out of here?"

_sein_ smiled. "No clue. Mike?"

"Yeah?"

"I'm sorry for pulling you into this." There was something in their eyes which hadn't been there before. Vulnerability.

"Don't." I smiled reassuringly and offered them my hand. "I understand, now."

They kept sitting, ignoring my hand. "Do you really?"

I nodded, and when they took my hand, something passed between us. Neither of us was surprised.

"Sein does mean 'to be' in German. It also means 'his'."

We were deep in the bowels of a place neither of us fully understood, the only other people here would very likely want to hurt us, and the future was as dark as it had ever been, but for this single moment, everything was alright.

"Let's go, then."

 

 

 

###### 97)

 

I wasn't going to find anything worthwhile in the library's equivalent of a kiddie pool. Going into the deep end, however, would come with its own dangers. I used a knife to make notches in some of the bookshelves, and before long, I realized that someone else had used this strategy. Judging by the way the cuts in the wood looked, that someone had been here within the last few days. I had found a trace of _sein_.

Following the notches would lead me either into the direction _sein_ came from or the one they went. I chose to go deeper into the library, still staying on the lookout for books.

With every corridor I passed, things got somewhat weirder. The lights dimmed to a dark amber, then changed colours altogether, until even the shadows they cast seemed multi-coloured, and the lights started to hide more than they revealed. From time to time, I doubted the notches surrounding the more narrow niches, but some door was always hidden in the shadows. Without _sein_'s tracks guiding me, I would have gotten horribly lost.

Depending on how I interpreted _sein_'s audio file, the notches might stop at some point, but it was possible—there it was. Neatly tucked between A History of Hogwarts and another book by the ever-prolific Kilgore Trout was a massive tome bound in red leather, with the label "A GUIDE TO THE LIBRARY UNPUBLISHED". I reproduce the title in all-caps here because it was written even more obnoxiously, in a neon green font that clashed horribly with the red cover. To grab even more attention, the book was studded with blinking LEDs. This simply had to be the book that _sein_ had claimed to have written into existence.

I opened it, and sure enough, the book even contained _sein_'s notes. With the book's map and their additions to it, it was going to be trivially easy to find them.

However, there was another option. The existence of the book corroborated _sein_'s claims, as a book decorated this gaudily was rather unlikely. Before, trying to invoke something I didn't understand hadn't seemed worthwhile, but now, it was possibly that it was exactly what I should do, even before I rescued _sein_.

 

When face-to-face with absolute power, _grasp it_. - > 57)

The path to every goal worth pursuing is lined with treacherous temptations. -> 18)

 

 

 

###### 99)

 

"That explanation doesn't make any sense."

Oh?

"You're telling me you have the resources to throw arbitrary amounts of processing power at the problem, but not to hire a few starving college students? Also, I've seen the books. Hell, I've got an expert to inspect one of them. You put a lot of materials and quite a few highly specialized work hours into their creation."

You doubt us.

"I do. I see two options, here. The first is that I'm hallucinating all of this, because it's honestly quite unbelievable, but that doesn't yield any useful information and doesn't compel me toward any action. The second one is that you lied about the part where Sein was one of your pawns, which means whatever their motives were, they didn't deceive me about knowing nothing about this mess."

We obtained the processing power through another ingenious trick. Have you heard of botnets, or distributed computing?

"No, and it doesn't matter. You can't convince me that you don't have any money because I've seen your library, and all those replicas of books didn't grow on trees."

What will you do with your doubt, then? Attempt to tear down the conspiracy behind the Library and expose it to the world?

"I couldn't care less for your conspiracy. I want to get Sein back."

And after you achieve that goal?

"After I achieve that goal, I'll get back to living my life."

No thirst for revenge. No drive to make the world a better place. How uninspiring. How positively _unheroic_.

"So what? I'm not a character in a book. I'm a real person."

The response one would expect. But you don't SEE, not like we do.

"I was wondering about your motivation. So you think that we're all living in a fictional world. The morality of your actions doesn't matter because nothing is real, is that your justification?"

No. You're willfully misrepresenting what we are saying. It's not about justifications, or morality. It's about purpose.

"And what is your purpose?"

Not our purpose. The purpose of the library. Have you seen it? I mean, really looked at it, tried to grasp it as a concept? Massive amounts of fictional books without any conceivable origin. It defies reason.

"You admit that you didn't write the books, then."

That's not the point right now. The point is that what we have here is something extraordinary, almost supernatural. Is it so wrong to be inspired by a miracle? We think this is worth defending.

For a moment, I was at a loss for words. "That's the most unbelievable thing I've heard today. You find some books in a cellar. The only option you see is that you're in a story, and you decide to become zealots? Idiocy."

What else?

"What else?" I shook my head. It was obvious that they had never read any of Cio's works. "What you should always do when you find something mysterious, significant and not immediately dangerous. You observe it. You experiment, trying to understand how it came to be and what one could do with it. And then, if it's useful, you use it to achieve your goals. You don't make it your goal. You shouldn't enslave yourself to a pile of books, for God's sake."

You haven't read it yet.

"What?"

Your most important book. There is one for everyone in this library, which means that there is one for you.

"Why should there be?"

Because it is Written.

The cultists had been brainwashed very thoroughly, and they were now trying to make me one of them. "No thanks."

It is your book. It was made for you. You will not regret it.

"The dead don't regret, either. What some brainwashed version of me might think is not relevant. Let me go."

Why would we?

"Because I know how you think now. If you really think that this is happening in a book, you won't mess with me precisely because I vow to get my revenge on you. You've cast yourselves into the role of the faceless cultists, and I am the hero who has a reason to be here, working against your evil schemes."

Without warning, a pair of hands gripped my neck from behind and pushed my face into the surface of the table. I was forced to keep looking at the screen.

We believe you talked about something like this with your friend Cio.

"Don't drag her into this." I strained to get the words out.

If we remember correctly, you told her that, since she did not know how the story was structured, she could not take advantage of any conventions, as straining against the bonds of the story might herald her downfall.

"Fuck you."

It turns out that in your case, it wasn't a tale about the hero overcoming all odds to save his friend. If you were a point-of-view character at all, you were one in a tale about reaching beyond your grasp. I wonder what would have happened if you hadn't tried to be smarter than everyone else. If you hadn't gotten caught up in your monologue instead of running away.

I was running short on oxygen, and it took the last of my energy to make out the words on the screen.

It seems that this is the ending you deserve.


	11. Appendix

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Editor's note: Of course, after receiving that distressing email from Mike, I immediately went to the police. What else was I supposed to do? He had gone missing. The police investigated, but didn't find anything in the house on Nuwenhoff Street. We didn't know about _sein_'s audio files, so there was no evidence anything had actually happened, and Mike was placed on the ever-growing list of missing people.
> 
> I didn't want to give up. You'll understand, now, why I wrote _The Book of Answers_ , which must have seemed pointless at the time. I hoped that by describing a book which held all the answers, I might gain access to them. I wanted to understand what seemed to be, at the time, the disappearance of a very lonely friend of mine. It was an absurd idea to hope that defining a fictional book would cause that very book to turn up at my doorstep, but that is exactly what happened.
> 
> This is it. The little yellow book which contained the details of the final weeks of Mike's life has been transcribed in full, and now nothing remains. Every last one of the details I've mentioned in _The Book of Answers_ was as it should be, and all the conversations I still remember were reproduced faithfully. The only thing it did not offer me was closure. You've read the ending. You've expressed your distaste for the lack of a clear conclusion in the comments. Believe me that your disappointment isn't on the same order of magnitude as mine. I just wanted to know! To be certain of something, even if it would have meant being certain of Mike's death.
> 
> I'm less certain of anything than ever before. In comparison, you guys have it easy: you have the option to see this as nothing more than another of my metafictional escapades. For you, it's on the other side of a screen, and you're safe. I have to live with it.
> 
> Expect a hiatus for a while, if not forever. I'm not in the mood to write right now.
> 
> As always, thanks for reading.
> 
> Cio

#### Appendix: Referenced Works

 

I've been digging around on Mike's computer, trying to find his email password to gain access to the audio files. Sadly, I failed. Instead, I found that he had written a few sentences for every book or manga he ever read, as well as some movies, and I thought those which defined fictional books mentioned in this work would make a fitting appendix to this, both to provide some context to my readers and to allow Mike to leave some kind of legacy. The books are listed in the order in which they appeared in the story.

 

 _Ashes on Mars_ is written in _Mr. Nobody_ (Movie)

I'm not an expert on movies, but I couldn't keep from getting onto my soapbox for this one. _Mr. Nobody_ is a tour de force of pure ambition, an attempt to explore almost all aspects of the concept choices in life. Whether it ended up being a masterpiece of nonlinear storytelling or a barely coherent wreck seems to be a matter of opinion.

 

 _The Black Goat's Egg_ is mentioned in _Tokyo Ghoul_ (Manga)

After an accident, meek bookworm Kaneki Ken receives an organ transplant from a dead victim of the same accident. As he recuperates, he notices a strange new hunger. He has become a Ghoul, a creature which subsists on human flesh. At least in the beginning, _Tokyo Ghoul_ stands out from similar series through its dark, yet thoughtful mood, as the protagonist's thoughts on his situation are informed by books from real and imagined authors running the gamut from Kafka to Hesse.

 

 _The Grasshopper Lies Heavy_ is mentioned in _The Man in the High Castle_

In _The Man in the High Castle_ , the Allies lost the second world war. America has been divided between the Nazis and the Japanese, and in the downtrodden populace, the merest embers of rebellion flare up. Integral to the plot is a book named _The Grasshopper Lies Heavy_ , which depicts an alternate reality in which the Allies won the war, with Great Britain becoming a dystopian superpower.

As might be expected of Dick, _The Man In the High Castle_ is a bleak, dystopian vision of an enslaved America.

 

 _The Shadow of the Wind_ is mentioned in _The Shadow of the Wind_

In _The Shadow of the Wind_ , a boy reads a book which changes his life. That might be the most archetypal story among bibliophiles, but Carlos Ruis Zafon combines it with an intriguing mystery and writes in a style that oozes with charm. 

 

The _Chesscourt_ series is mentioned in _The Northern Caves_

A cult author's fans struggle with his almost incomprehensible final work. As they meet for a live reading of the material, tensions in the group threaten to tear it apart.

 _The Northern Caves_ is a clever meditation on the nature of fandom and offers a truly extraordinary example of a fictional book. Insightful and thought-provoking.

 

 _The Dream Machine_ is written in _The Dream Machine_

Though my life has been turbulent as of late, I had to find the time to read _The Dream Machine_ , since a friend of mine wrote it. It's Science Fiction about the creation of a storytelling program, and contains some very interesting ideas on the mathematization of stories. Though a program writing fairy tales is most likely still some decades away, it seems plausible to the point of being inevitable here.

 

 _Aloof Antares_ is written in _Akumetsu_ (Manga)

In Akumetsu, a teenage terrorist murder-suicides corrupt politicians. The method of execution varies according to the actual crimes the politician has perpetrated.

Very cathartic, but not very deep.

 

An incomplete list of the books mentioned in the sections describing the Library (Mike apparently hasn't read all of the books he claims to have recognized, which I attribute to his TVTropes binges):

 

Tom Riddle's diary, _Magical Theory_ , and _A History of Hogwarts_ are mentioned in _Harry Potter_

__

I'm not sure I can write anything on the subject of _Harry Potter_ that hasn't been written already. Suffice to say, I read it as a child and was enraptured by the world and the characters, and even as an adult, I feel myself drawn back to it from time to time for more reasons than simple nostalgia.

__

 

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Various works by Kilgore Trout are mentioned in Kurt Vonnegut's _Slaughterhouse-Five_ (Editor's Note: as well as other Vonnegut books, but this is the only relevant one Mike has read.)

__

_Slaughterhouse-Five_ is the second Vonnegut I've read, and after _Sirens of Titan_ , I had high expectations. I have to admit that I was somewhat disappointed, as Slaughterhouse-Five is less tightly plotted and features far more mundane character arcs. However, it had some nice Mind Screw elements, which I always appreciate.

__

 

__

_The King in Yellow_ is mentioned in _The King in Yellow_

__

Robert W. Chambers's short stories have been a major influence on, among others, H. P. Lovecraft, and it's easy to see why. The common thread of the stories is a play called The King in Yellow, which turns its readers mad. What little of the play is revealed is haunting and terrifying in a very otherworldly way, and any mention of it heralds madness and depravity.

__

Not quite as interesting is the second part of the collection of short stories, which has nothing to do with horror at all.

__

 

__

_The Princess Bride_ is mentioned in _The Princess Bride_

__

_The Princess Bride_ is a cookie-cutter adventure novel wrapped into a framing device which claims that the novel is merely an abridged version of a longer and more 'serious' work. The inner novel isn't deep or clever, and the outer part adds nothing but self-depreciation on part of the writer. Somehow, it's a mainstay of American nerd culture, which I don't understand at all.

__

 

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_The Hive Queen and the Hegemon_ is written in _Ender's Game_ (Editor's Note: and various sequels, of which Mike seems to have read the first two.)

__

_Ender's Game_ is a defining book of my childhood. At first glance, it might seem like silly young-adult Sci-Fi: an extraordinarily clever boy commands Earth's fleets against insectoid aliens. Yet, the book doesn't lack depth, as _Ender's Game_ delves deeply into the psychological tolls exacted on the protagonist. Surprisingly thoughtful for a 'children's book'; I recommend it to readers both young and old.

__

 

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_The City of Dreaming Books_ is mentioned in _The City of Dreaming Books_

__

German Comedic Fantasy author Walter Moers is at it again. In this supposed translation of an autobiography, author (and dinosaur) Optimus Yarnspinner explores the eponymous city in search for the author of the perfect single-page story. I have my online buddy _sein_ to thank for recommending Moers. Everything by him has been hilariously creative so far.

__

 

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_The Never-Ending Story_ is mentioned in _The Never-Ending Story_

__

Most Americans are probably more familiar with the movie version of _The Never-Ending Story_. I encourage them to give the book a try, as Michael Ende combines metatextual Fantasy with surprisingly poetic prose. It's probably most well-suited to children and non-self-conscious adults, as most edgy teenagers would (wrongly) consider it "too childish".

__

 

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_The Red Book of Westmarch_ is written in _The Lord of the Rings_

__

_The Lord of the Rings_ defined modern Fantasy. For that reason alone, everyone interested in the genre should at least attempt to read it, though it's not an easy read by most standards. I think that classic Fantasy becomes interesting when the author brings an unique perspective to the art of worldbuilding. In this case, the linguist in Tolkien comes through in every name and every Elvish word, and it's not surprising that conlangs are still a common feature in Fantasy books.

__

 

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The _Cryptonomicon_ is written in _Cryptonomicon_

__

_Cryptonomicon_ is yet another Doorstopper of epic proportions by Neal Stephenson. This one is a historical novel following three story threads, two of which happen in the second world war, while the third is set in more current times. I don't consider it the best Stephenson, but it comes especially recommended if you have an interest in cryptography, as _Cryptonomicon_ provides an easy point of entry into both the history and the general philosophy of the science.

__

 

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The book labeled _Holy Writ_ is mentioned in _The Book of Sand_ (Editor's Note: a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Mike usually didn't write reviews for short stories, but this one seemed to have left an impression.)

__

Of Borges's many fascinating short stories, _The Book of Sand_ was the one that impressed me the most. The protagonist acquires a book with pages seemingly labelled in a random order. Neither the first nor the last page can be found, and some of the page numbers are absurdly large. Soon, the protagonist realizes that the book is infinite. My fascination for fictional books and impossible objects is immense, and I think this short story was what first drew me to those concepts.

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End file.
